African Books Collective Seller 2018_web.pdf · African Books Collective (ABC) is an African owned,...

African Books Collective2018 Bestseller and New Titles Catalogue

- About Us -African Books Collective (ABC) is an African owned, worldwide marketing and distribution outlet for

books from Africa - scholarly, literature and children’s books. Founded, owned and governed by a group of African publishers.

ABC seeks to be the primary distribution choice for independent African publishers; to provide the most comprehensive selection of relevant material to customers worldwide in the form they require; to achieve ABC’s cultural aims whilst operating in a wholly commercial space; and to grow the market for African

books worldwide.

Titles stocked are from many of the leading publishers in Africa: scholarly, literary, art books, children’s books, and books in African languages and in translation. They are available in print, and many also as ebooks, in European and some African languages. The participants are independent African publishers

on the Continent. They include scholarly and literary, and some children’s book publishers: research institutes, university presses, commercial presses – large and small, NGOs, and writers’ organisations.

- History -A group of African publishers met in 1985 to address the constraints publishers were experiencing in financing, marketing and distributing their books, and the dearth of African published materials in the North. They founded ABC as a collective self-help initiative to strengthen the economic base of

independent African publishers and to meet the needs of Northern libraries and other book buyers. With initial support from funding agencies, trading began in 1989.

Major remodelling of ABC took place in 2007, when it became self-financing, and moved to a largely digital model. Since then further refinements have been made in the organisation and consequently

profitability is on the increase with publishers seeing bonuses paid out in recent years. New opportunities afforded by the evolution of digital publishing and electronic books have been seized upon with ABC

playing a key role in the digitisation of African cultural output. Whilst adapting to changing markets and methodologies, ABC’s founding ethos and aims remain unchanged and ABC remains a not-for-profit

organisation on its own behalf.

- Governance and Organisation -ABC is a collective owned by its 17 founder publishers. The founder publishers elect a five-member

Council of Management which meets annually. The Council of Management is responsible for setting the collective’s strategy and for its representation in the wider book and publishing world, in government,

NGO and cultural organizations, within and outside Africa.

ABC is a UK-registered not-for-profit company limited by guarantee. It has two UK non-executive directors who are legally responsible for the company. ABC seeks to be profit making on behalf of its

publishers, and is non-profit making on its own behalf.

ContentsParticipating Publishers i

Non-Fiction 1

Literature 11 Children’s Books& Young Adult 25

Academic Books 33

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www.africanbookscollective.com

African Books CollectiveAFRICAN BOOKS COLLECTIVE (ABC) is a non-profit worldwide marketing and distribution outlet for over 3,000 print titles from Africa, of which 900 are also eBooks - scholarly, literature and children’s books. Founded, owned and governed by a group of African publishers, its participants are 182 independent and autonomous African publishers from 22 countries.

The participants in ABC are autonomous and independent African publishers. They share a common ethos of publishing from within African cultures, asserting Africa’s voice within Africa and internationally. They include scholarly and literary, and some children’s book publishers: research institutes, university presses, commercial presses – large and small, NGOs, and writers’ organisations.

Ordering InformationAfrican Books Collective LtdPO Box 721Oxford OX1 9ENUKorders@africanbookscollective.comwww.africanbookscollective.com

Titles are all available for immediate supply directly via the details above, from wholesalers Ingram, Gardners, Bertrams and Baker and Taylor. ABC distributed titles are available from major Library Wholesalers YBP. Individuals can also order online at: www.africanbookscollective.com or from a number of online retailers such as amazon.com.

African Books Collective, as well as print editions, also distributes electronic content on behalf of publishers. eBooks in ePub format are available worldwide from a huge variety of retailers.

Libraries can order over 1000 titles for their collections through either Ebrary, EBSCO, eBooks Library (EBL), Project MUSE, Biblioboard, Cyberlibris and many more. In Africa the ABC collection is available to libraries through the Baobab Books platform.

Cover Image: Rebel Heart I by Ohab TBJ from: Fashion Illustration Africa: see page 3

African Books Collective Participating PublishersBenin

Centre Panafricain de Prospective Sociale/Pan-African Social Prospects Centre, Porto-Novo

Botswana

Foundation for Education with Production, GaboroneLightbooks Publishers, GaboronePyramid Publishing, Gaborone

Cameroon

Department of Women & Gender Studies, Univ. of BueaLangaa Research and Publishing Common Initiative Group, BamendaSpears Media Press, BamendaMuntu Institute Press. Yaounde

Ethiopia

Addis Ababa Univ. Press, AddisDevelopment Policy Management Forum (DPMF), Addis AbabaForum for Social Studies, Addis AbabaOrganisation for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa (OSSREA), Addis Ababa

The Gambia

CenMEDRA, Centre for Media and Development Research in Africa, BakauEducational Services, Serekunda

Ghana

Afram Publications (Ghana) Ltd, AccraAfrica Christian Press, AccraAmanza, AccraAssociation of African Universities, AccraBlackmask, AccraFreedom Publications, AccraGhana Universities Press, AccraSankofa Educational Publishers, AccraSedco Publishing, AccraSEM Financial Training Centre Ltd., AccraSub-Saharan Publishers, AccraThird World Network – Africa, AccraUnited Nations University Institute for Natural Resources, Accra Woeli Publishing Services, Accra

Kenya

Academy Science Publishers, NairobiAfrican Research and Resource Forum (ARRF), NairobiBookmark Africa, NairobiChrisley Ltd, NairobiEast African Educational Publishers, NairobiFocus Publications, NairobiImagine Works, NairobiUniversity of Nairobi Press, NairobiLawAfrica, NairobiLonghorn Publishers, NairobiP-J Kenya, NairobiSyokimau Cultural Centre, NairobiTwaweza Communications, NairobiVita Books, NairobiZand Graphics, NairobiZapf Chancery Publications Africa, Limuru

Lesotho

Institute of Southern African Studies, National University of Lesotho, Roma

Liberia

Cotton Tree Press, MonroviaOne More Book, Brooklyn

Malawi

Central Africana, ZombaChancellor College Publications, ZombaE & V Publications, BlantyreImabili Indigenous Knowledge Publications, ZombaKachere Series, ZombaLuviri Press, MzuzuMuzuni Press, MzuzuWASI (Writers Advisory Services International), Zomba

Mali Republic

Editions Yeelen

Mauritius

Editions VIZAVI, Port LouisUniversity of Mauritius Press, Réduit

Morocco

Editions du Sirocco, CasablancaSenso Unico Editions, Mohammedia

Namibia

The Basler Afrika BibliographienBrookridge Publishing, Walvis BayReader in Namibian Sociology, WindhoekUniversity of Namibia Press, Windhoek

Nigeria

African Heritage Press, LagosApex Books, LagosThe Book Company Ltd., LagosBooks and Gavel, LagosBook Builders, LagosCissus World Press, USACollege Press Publishers, IbadanConcept Publishers, Oyo StateCSS Ltd, LagosDokun Publishing House, IbadanEmotion Press, LagosEnicrownfit Publishers, IbadanFourth Dimension Publishing Co. Ltd., EnuguFrontPage Media, LagosHandel Books, Eastern NigeriaHEBN Publishers, IbadanHumanities Publishers, IbadanIbadan Cultural Studies Group, IbadanIbadan University Press, IbadanKemuela Publications, Port HarcourtKraft Books, LagosKwara State University Press, MaleteMaiyati Chambers, LagosMalthouse Press Ltd., LagosManila Publishers Company, AbujaM & J Grand Orbit Communications, Port HarcourtNew Horn Press, IbadanNiyi Osundare, IbadanObafemi Awolowo University Press, Ile IfeOnyoma Research Publications, Port HarcourtOpon Ifa Readers, LagosPaclerd Press Limited, IbadanProgess Publishing Company, EnuguSafari Books, IbadanSaros International Publishers, Port HarcourtSCRIBO Publications, IbadanSpectrum Books Ltd., IbadanUniversity of Lagos Press, LagosUniversity Press Ltd., IbadanUrhobo Historical Society, New York & LagosWest African Book Publishers, Ltd, Lagos

Senegal

African Renaissance, DakarCouncil for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), DakarUnion for African Population Studies, Dakar

South Africa

Africa Institute of South Africa, PretoriaAfrican Minds Publishers, StellenboschAfrican Perspectives, JohannesburgThe African Public Policy and Research Institute, PretoriaAfro-Middle East Centre, JohannesburgAgency for Social Reconstruction, JohannesburgBrenthurst Collection/Frank Horley Books, JohannesburgCover2Cover Books, MuizenbergDryad Press, Cape TownIdasa, Cape TownIkhwezi Afrika Publishing, East LondonImpepho Press, JohannesburgJohnson & KingJames Books, Cape TownMail and Guardian Books, JohannesburgModjaji Books, Cape TownNISC (Pty) Ltd, GrahamstownSouthern African Migration Project, Cape Town uHlanga Press, Cape TownUmsinsi Press, Cape Town

Swaziland

Academic Publishers, MbabaneJAN Publishing Centre, MbabaneTTI Publishing Ltd, Mbabane

Tanzania

Centre for Energy, Environment, Science & Technology (CEEST), Dar es SalaamDar es Salaam University Press, Dar es SalaamE & D Ltd., Dar es SalaamMkuki na Nyota Publishers, Dar es SalaamTanzania Educational Publishers, BukobaTanzania Publishing House, Dar es Salaam

Uganda

Fountain Publishers Ltd., KampalaFEMRITE (Uganda Women Writers’ Association), KampalaPelican Publishers, KampalaProgressive Publishing House, Kampala

Zambia

Bookworld Publishers, LusakaGadsden Publishers, LusakaImage Publishers, LusakaThe Lembani Trust, Zambia, LusakaMultimedia Zambia, LusakaUniversity of Zambia Press (UNZA Press), LusakaZambia Women Writers Association, Lusaka

Zimbabwe

Africa Community Publishing & Development Trust, Harareamabooks Publishers, BulawayoAmagugu Publishers, BulawayoBaobab Books, HarareBooklove Publishers, GweruGALZ, HarareKimaathi Publishing House, HarareMambo Press, GweruMwanaka Media and Publishing Pvt Ltd, ChitungwizaSAPES Trust, HarareSouthern African Research and Documentation Centre (SARDC), HarareSouthern and Eastern African Trade, Information and Negotiations Institute (SEATINI), HarareUniversity of Zimbabwe Publications, HarareWeaver Press Ltd, HarareWomen and Law in Southern Africa Research Trust, HarareZimbabwe International Book Fair Trust, HarareZimbabwe Publishing House, HarareZimbabwe Women Writers, Harare

Non-Fiction

Hadzabe By The Light of a Million FiresDaudi Peterson

Daudi Peterson, working closely with a committee of Hadzabe Elders in Tanzania, gives an unprecedented inside account of one of the world’s last hunter–gatherer societies as seen through their own eyes.

Over thousands of years, the Hadzabe oral history unfolded as elders narrated their stories around countless fires in their bush camps of the remote Yaeda valley. Building on years spent working with and accompanying Hadzabe in the field, Daudi and Trude Peterson and Jon Cox photographed hunter–gatherer daily life, culture, and knowledge, from digging tubers to collecting honey and medicinal plants, hunting game and making tools out of just about everything. This documentary rich with photographs, illustrations and Hadzabe handwritten text is an innovative approach to documenting one of the world’s most unique remaining indigenous cultures.

“Eye–opening—shatters the great myth about hunter–gatherers and highlights the essential role of sharing for a sustainable world. Based on a blend of relevant research and authentic stories, this book can remind us of who we truly are.”

- Richard Leider, Bestselling Author of Repacking Your Bags & The Power of Purpose

“Hadzabe, By the Light of a Million Fires is a remarkable book—a vibrant, engaging portrait of the lives, aspirations and dilemmas of contemporary Hadzabe from their own perspectives, in their own words. Listen to older men tell stories from the past. Learn how to hunt, gather, and live off the land in environmentally sustainable ways...This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the past, present and future of Africa and Africans.”

- Dorothy L. Hodgson, Professor & Chair of Anthropology, Rutgers University

“Daudi Peterson and his Hadza colleagues have produced a wonderful natural and cultural history of an ancient lifestyle that has almost vanished, but a people who are very much alive. Their rich portrayal connects us to the hunting and gathering ways of our African ancestors by documenting the society of a few hundred Hadza who are fully aware of what they represent: a modern people who are also the best hope for a continuing tie By The Light of a Million Fires to our deep past.”

- Richard Wrangham, Author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

260 pages | 240 x 300 mm | 2013 | Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, TanzaniaPaperback: 978-9987-082-96-4 $41/£26

Best Seller

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Fashion Illustration AfricaTapiwa Matsinde

Discover Africa’s rising generation of fashion illustrators who are bringing diversity to the industry.

Fashion Illustration Africa is a vibrant, visually inspiring sourcebook that presents the work of 23 dynamic fashion illustrators and designers drawn from across Africa and the diaspora, whose work is shaping what has until now been a virtually non-existent commercial industry across the continent. Given a voice by social media and the internet’s democratizing, border-crossing

abilities, this is a young and digitally savvy generation who are also championing diversity in a global industry that tends to be defined by one model of beauty and style.

112 pages | 229 x 152 mm | 2016 | Shoko Press, UKPaperback: 978-0-9954706-0-6 $20/£13

BeautifulMario Epanya

BEAUTIFUL is a celebration of black beauty captured through the lens of Paris-based Cameroon-born photographer, Mario Epanya.

For just over a decade, Epanya has been working to promote diversity in fashion and portraiture, highlighting the myriad shades and textures in black skin tone and

hair as well as the variety of body shapes and sizes. BEAUTIFUL presents a stunning collection of existing and never before seen portraits featuring everyday women and models of colour and it pays homage to the strong women who raised Epanya, his beloved grandmother, mother, sisters, aunts and friends - telling the visual story that black is indeed BEAUTIFUL.

168 pages | 240 x 200 mm | 2017 | Shoko Press, UKHardback: 978-0-9954706-2-0 $40/£29.99

Best Seller

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Garfield ToddThe End of the Liberal Dream in Rhodesia The authorised biography by Susan Woodhouse

Prime minister Garfield Todd of Southern Rhodesia became known outside the country in January 1958 when his Cabinet rebelled and resigned. Within the country, the wonder was that he became Prime Minister in the first place.

Todd personified the failed liberal dream in Africa after the Second World War when Britain was in the process of dismantling her empire and attempting to create a multi-cultural show-piece in Central Africa – the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland – which would form a British-influenced economic and political entity that effectively separated an encroaching Marxist-influenced black nationalism in the north from an equally militant form of white Afrikaner nationalism emanating from South Africa, particularly after the establishment of apartheid, the Nazi-inspired system of racial segregation, in 1948. The failure of Todd, and the European liberals who supported him, cleared the decks for what they most feared: a head-on racial collision that cost at least 35,000 lives during the war of liberation between the years 1972 and 1979.

This book traces the development, triumph and failure of the man who unexpectedly found himself at the centre of political life in Southern Rhodesia, during the explosive years of 1953 to 1958. Todd was born in New Zealand and sent to Southern Rhodesia in 1934 by the Churches of Christ to take over their small mission station near Shabani in Matabeleland. Having built this up into a thriving centre of a wide circle of churches and schools, Todd entered Parliament in 1946 in Sir Godfrey Huggins’ United Party. Here he established a reputation as a sound, intelligent M.P. and a fine speaker. Todd’s missionary years formed the foundation of his premiership, the basis of his close relationship with blacks (including many who would become leaders of their people), and his understanding of their difficulties, frustrations and growing ambitions.

When Todd was ousted from the premiership he continued his increasingly desperate attempts to persuade the whites that their only hope for the future lay in co-operating with black nationalism. He was so vilified by them that he withdrew entirely from formal politics – but he still did what he could – writing, speaking, lobbying influential people in Britain and the USA – to avert the inevitable disaster. He was arrested three times (once on a capital charge); restricted to his ranch twice, for a total of five-and-a-half years; and imprisoned in solitary confinement for six weeks; but never charged or tried in a court of law. At Independence, he served as a Senator for five years.

624 pages | 230 x 150 mm | 2018 | Weaver Press, ZimbabwePaperback: 978-1-77922-323-4 $40/£30

New Title


My Life, My CameraMohinder Dhillon

The remarkable life-story of Mohinder Dhillon, a frontline news cameraman on the world stage, from his start as a budding photojournalist in Kenya.

His story covers many of the seminal African and world events from the 1950s, documenting the changing face of an Africa liberated from colonial rule. His reporting covers many of the following internal conflicts including the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964, the Simba Rebellion in the Congo, the Siege of Stanleyville, the Aden War, the rise and fall of Idi Amin and the expulsion of the Asian minorities, and was on the frontline recording the fall of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia and the birth of Zimbabwe. He was the official cameraman to Haile Selassie, and later recorded the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s, footage that shocked the world, raising millions of dollars in famine relief.

After this golden age of television news, the waning of foreign interest in Africa, and rapidly advancing video technology, he focussed on making full-length television documentaries. In this period, he recorded the grim ecological impacts post the Vietnam war; and also undertook another news assignment to film the shattered, war-torn country of Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion. He recalls the horrific events of the 1988 US Embassy bombing in Nairobi and the 2013 terror attack on the city’s Westgate Mall.

Reflecting on the triumphs and tragedies of his life, his story is imbued with passion and gentle humour, a love of his adopted Kenya from his Sikh roots in the Punjab. It is a moving story of what it means to be human in the face of unspeakable suffering and violence.

687 pages | 229 x 152 mm | 2016 | Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, TanzaniaCased 3 Vols: 978-9987-753-60-4 $70/£58

Best Seller


Township Girls: The Cross-Over Generation is a compelling anthology of the deeply personal reminisces of

women growing up in Zimbabwe during the transition from colonialism to independence.Written by lawyers, doctors, businesswomen and other professionals, the book is a unique narrative of an oppressive political system as experienced by children and the youth. Whilst the book has a special focus on harrowing school experiences in a racially segregated Rhodesia, it is also an account of political consciousness during the war years and the challenges of navigating post-independence crises. Many of the writers were hitherto unpublished authors and their reflections, which are frequently written in dramatic prose, are an interesting account of lives of privilege lived under political oppression. Alternatively sad and funny, ‘Madora to lobster, in one quantum leap’ [Mpofu], their interpretation of the events of that time evoke feelings in of joy and sadness in the reader. In many ways, the book is an important historical record of the unheralded lives of the women who lived in ‘two worlds’ [Mpofu], ‘I lived with Africans but went to school with whites’ [Garwe] and were ‘raised to be confident and proud’ [Chitiyo]. At a time when the feminist discourse on gender equality was not as commonplace as it is today in Zimbabwe, the book provides a unique insight into the strong influence the writer’s parents, whose academic ambitions for the girl child was no less than that for the boy child, had on the successes of the writers. ‘It was assumed that high school ended at A-level and not before, and that this exam was but if stepping stone to University. The only questions were: after a level what subjects would you do for a level? And forward to degree course would a level prepare one? Girls were not exempt from these expectations.’ [Chitiyo] The writer’s parents were in many instances teachers and nurses by profession. All were acutely aware of the freedom and opportunities that education gave to those who possessed it and were prepared to work hard. Whilst the writers’ parents strove to give their children the very best education and amenities that their personal resources could buy, which included private schooling in multiracial schools and exposure to white cultural activities and practices such as classical music, ballet and other forms of dance - even if such classes were taken ‘generally anchored {in} the back row’ in the downtown studios of Joan Turner’s School of Dance [Mpofu] - the anthology also documents in disturbing detail the trauma and distress suffered by the writers who under- went sudden transition from community township schools in which the they had excelled and had lots of friends to suburban

schools which, though better resourced, were populated by white teachers and ‘droves of white children’ [Hadebe], racially prejudiced and abusive. In addition to narrating ‘the loss of their language and African identity and history’ [Hadebe], and the irony of being‘sold on whiteness’ [ Garwe], authors like Hadebe and Chimombe document in detail the humiliation and ridicule they personally suffered in the quest to fulfil their parents’ desire to give them as broad an education as possible. Hadebe writes: ‘I never shared this painful event, or the many more that reflected racial prejudice, with my parents. Instead I chose to live it alone. This I did, because I knew my parents’ decision to move me to this white school had and then a favourable status in the community. They were revered, and they saw themselves as pioneers. The whole decision was also a financial drain on them and I was not about to tell them that I hated the school and missed my simple township friends.’ Chimombe describes the embarrassment and demoralisation she suffered at the hands of a high school teacher who constantly harped that ‘Africans were not made for swimming as their bones were only designed for running’ to such an extent that any hopes she had of becoming a swimming champion were ‘immediately dissolved’. Garwe describes with wry humour the incongruity of being the best student in English literature and language but being discouraged by the Domincan Convent nuns from excelling in English because the ‘Rhodesia government’s doctrine did not allow that an African child could speak English better than a white child.’ As a consequence, and in an effort to pacify the consternation caused by her being the best English student, the nuns decided that a white would receive the English prize and she had the ‘dubious honour’ of being the best History Student for 1983 - ‘thereby depriving a more deserving History buff’. In addition to the writers’ personal interpretations of their schooling experiences, the book is at the same time a record of rising political consciousness of the writers during the war years. In spite of their privileged existence, the writers had firsthand experiences of the brutality of the war waged by the liberation fighters and the Rhodesian army. Theirs was not just a sheltered existence – they were often sharply aware of the fears and concerns of their parents. Xoliswa Sithole writes an unnerving account of her experiences of the war at a rural primary school at the age of nine: ‘ … we got used to seeing the comrades at night and singing songs to early hours of the morning and the Rhodesian soldiers coming to school in the morning to arrest student

activists. At times, the soldiers would take the older girls and burn cigarettes under their breasts as part of the interrogation process. A friend of ours – let’s call her Maidei – also suffered when her father was buried alive by vakomana/comrades. He was suspected of being an informer, a dzakutsaku.’ Katedza’s poem poignantly captures the brutality of the war years and the ways in which the adults’ fears and anxieties concernin the war overwhelmed the innocence of youth. Machibaya, Dangarembizi and Hadebe narrate with great candour of the fears and anxieties they suffered as children concerned for the physical wellbeing of their parents and family members as well as the impact of the war on family finances, the challenges of accommodating in modest township housing extended family members fleeing the war in the rural areas, political activism in urban areas, police brutality and the eventual euphoria and excitement attendant on Zimbabwe’s attainment of independence. Township Girls is more than just an unnerving narration of the educational, political and economic challenges experienced by the contributors during the seventies and eighties, it is also a humorous and loving tribute to parents who straddled the rural and urban divide with determination, aplomb and finesse – organising lift clubs to ferry children to and fro school and dance classes; ensuring the children spent part of their school holidays with extended family in the rural areas; providing entertainment for their children in the way of ‘ ’flicks’ in town’, ‘pop festivals at Gwanzura Stadium, the Salisbury show complete with Luna Park and fireworks’; equipping themselves with new culinary and deportment skills to help them navigate the new area of entertaining in a multiracial milieu in an independent Zimbabwe; and with the new dispensation seizing the opportunity to acquire spacious homes in the former white only suburbs. On the mines, writers like Musabayana experienced a vibrant cosmopolitan life where different languages and dialects were spoken; Christians, Muslims, atheists and traditionalists co-existed; children played outdoors; sporting and cultural activities were common including live shows by popular local musicians and entertainers such as Safirio Madzikatire; beauty contests were held for the women ‘some of whose marriages did not survive the wives’ newfound celebrity status’ and sewing competitions in which the winners’ ‘exquisitely embroidered table cloths … disappeared … with no compensation, into the homes of the madams who lived ‘kumayadhi’ ‘ and housing cleanliness competitions. Township Girls is a timely collection of childhood anecdotes by women who look on life as an adventure and regard their skills, experiences and contribution to society as worthy of documenting for posterity.

Township Girls. The Cross-Over GenerationEdited by Wadzanai Garwe, Farai Mpisaunga Mpofu and Nomsa Mwamuka

This collection comprises the stories of women who grew up in two countries, Rhodesia, prior to Independence and Zimbabwe post-1980.

The contributors reflect on their childhoods with refreshing candour. Many of their memories retain the crystalline clarity of childhood and thus provide insights into worlds that have often remained unexplored. Behind these women stood dedicated, hard-working parents - often teachers, nurses or businessmen and women - determined that their children succeed through education. The commitment of this emerging middle class provides us with a tragic reminder of the negative obduracy of the Smith regime which consistently denied such citizens the vote. Nonetheless, we are repeatedly reminded not of the dark side of an essentially racist regime, but of the joys of a secure childhood when parents and communities were steadfast in their values, and families consistently offered stability and security. Few will read Township Girls: The Cross-Over Generation without feeling that they have learned something new and been invited into a different world.

Wadzanai Garwe is a mother of two wonderful adult children. In her professional life, she is a development practitioner specializing in financial and economic analysis and management and assisting governments in designing community based investment projects.

Farai Mpisaunga Mpofu is co-founder of VIRL Financial Services P/L (est. 2010) and is country director of VIRL Social Foundation (est. 2014). A senior Communications, Marketing and Investor Relations professional, she served in the Insurance and Banking environment for over 20 years.

Nomsa Mwamuka is a researcher, writer, producer and project manager with over 20 years’ experience working across various media platforms from film, TV and radio to print, focusing, in particular, on arts events and cultural festivals. Nomsa contributes feature articles to various publications and is the award-winning author of Makeba: the Miriam Makeba Story.

278 pages | 210 x 140 mm | 2018 | Weaver Press, ZimbabwePaperback: 978-1-77922-325-8 $34/£18eBook: 978-1-77922-326-5 $30/£15

Best Seller


John KiyayaTanzania photographer and People of Lake Tanganyika John Kiyaya

John Kiyaya was selected at the Photographic Research Centre Boston University, top winner of the prestigious Leopold Godowsky Jr. Colour Photography Award.

John Kiyaya was born in Kasanga village, Sumbawanga, Tanzania in 1970. His story in pursuit of his passion as a photographer known only to his subjects, the workers, fishermen and peasants of this region of Tanzania along Lake Tanganyika, brought him acclaim from international photography circles, first in Europe and then to U.S.A. He was selected at the Photographic Research Centre Boston University, top winner of the prestigious Leopold Godowsky Jr. Colour Photography Award, competing with photographers from Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.

This book tells John Kiyaya’s story and brings together a selection of his photographs which brought him fame even if not fortune. From here on he will no longer be the unknown photographer from Tanzania. An interview of John Kiyaya by the publisher and several essays about him and his work puts him in the context of Tanzania and its people’s pride in their culture as they pursue, their means of livelihood and they celebrate their national and religious festivals, their weddings and the rights of passage of their children.

148 pages | 315 x 255 mm | 2013 | Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, TanzaniaHardback: 978-9987-082-54-4 $46/£29

Best Seller


Jabulani Means Rejoice. A Dictionary of South African Names 2nd. Ed.Phumzile Simelane Kalumba

Jabulani Means Rejoice is a dictionary comprised of hundreds of African names in local South African languages, meticulously assembled and expounded upon for the curious reader.

Names are listed in alphabetical order with gender indications, as well as information regarding their ethnographic origins and meanings. Yet, Jabulani Means Rejoice is so much more than simply a list of names and their meanings. The author skilfully interweaves cultural context and history, including issues surrounding naming rituals, domestic disputes and the curse of the evil eye. As a reference work, the book stands as an invaluable contribution to the growing interest in African cultural history. With its names ranging from the traditional to the unconventional, it will appeal to linguists, family historians and anyone with an interest in names.

“A better alternative to Google searches, because the author doesn’t just list and translate names. Instead, she provides the cultural context and history of black South Africans, because our names are seldom just names.”

- Zaza Hlalethwa, Mail & Guardian , South Afirica

Born in Mpumalanga, Phumzile Simelane Kalumba, graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1998 with a BCom degree. She lived in the North East of England with her family for 7 years. Whilst there, she developed interest in South African Bantu names. She is currently pursuing her Masters Degree in the Department of Xhosa,at the University of the Western Cape with special interest in onomastics, which is part of African folklore.

338 pages | 210 x 140 mm | 2018 | Modjaji Books, South AfricaPaperback: 978-1-928215-49-3 $40/£29

New Title


EAST AFRICA

Comprehensive Swahili-English DictionaryMohamed A. Mohamed East African Educational Publishers, Kenya 9789966258120 924pp. 2011 $86/£63

English Swahili Pocket DictionaryJ.F. Safari, H. AkidaMkuki na Nyota Publishers, Tanzania 9789976973044 284pp. 1991 $31/£23

English-Kiswahili Assorted DictionaryEdited by K.W. WamitilaFocus Books, Kenya 9789966882707 432pp. 2002 $44/£30

Juba Arabic English Dictionary/Kamuus ta Arabi Juba wa IngliiziIan Smith, Morris T. AmaFountain Publishers, Uganda 9789970024759 216pp. 2005 $39/£17

Kamusi ya Visawe/Swahili Dictionary of SynonymsMohamed A. Mohamed, Said A. MohamedEast African Educational Publishers, Kenya 9789966468987 284pp. 1998 $45/£28

Kiswahili for BeginnersY M KihoreDar es Salaam University Press, Tanzania 9789976602586 116pp. 2000 $24/£17

Lhukonzo-English/English-Lhukonzo DictionaryBalinandi KambaleFountain Publishers, Uganda 9789970025749 320pp. 2006 $52/£39

Luganda-English Phrase Book for TouristsMargaret NanfukaFountain Publishers, Uganda 9789970020638 52pp. 1995 $19/£15

Lwo English DictionaryAlexander OdongaFountain Publishers, Uganda 9789970024872 304pp. 2005 $46/£30

Modern Swahili GrammarMohamed A. MohamedEast African Educational Publishers, Kenya 9789966467614 292pp. 2001 $39/£28

A Simplified Lugbara-English DictionaryPaul Ongua IgaFountain Publishers, Uganda9789970021055 76pp. 1999 $26/£15

Swahili for ForeignersAlice Wanjiku Mangat

East African Educational Publishers, Kenya 9789966250964 284pp. 2001 $39/£28

Swahili Made EasyJ.F. SafariMkuki na Nyota Publishers, Tanzania 9789987081790 272pp. 2012 $31/£23

Swahili/English Pocket DictionaryJ.F. Safari, H. AkidaMkuki na Nyota Publishers, Tanzania 9789976973792 216pp. 2003 $34/£17

Southern Africa

A Beginner’s Guide to BembaEdited by Gostave C. Kasonde, Joan HaigThe Lembani Trust, Zambia 9789982997225 56pp. 2010 $23/£18

Duramazwi: A Shona - English DictionaryD. DaleMambo Press, Zimbabwe 9781904855361 264pp. 2000 $39/£26

English - Shona. A Basic DictionaryD. DaleMambo Press, Zimbabwe 9780869220146 228pp. 1975 $26/£16

English - Ciyawo Learner’s DictionaryEdited by Ian D. DicksMzuni Press, Malawi 9789996045288 530pp. 2018 $50/£35

A Practical Guide to Understanding CiyawoIan D. Dicks, Shawn DollarKachere Series, Malawi 9789990887853 176pp. 2010 $34/£26

Shona CompanionD. DaleMambo Press, Zimbabwe 9780869220016 348pp. 1972 $33/£26

Shona Mini CompanionD. DaleMambo Press, Zimbabwe 9780869221563 148pp. 1981 $24/£13

Tumbuka/Tonga - English & English - Tumbuka/Tonga DictionaryWm. Y. TurnerCentral Africana, Malawi 9789990814149 292pp. 2002 $61/£40

West Africa

A Chamba-English DictionaryRaymond Boyd, Isa Sa’adMalthouse Press, Nigeria 9789780232672 234pp. 2010 $46/£34

A Comprehensive Course in Twi (Asante) for the Non-Twi LearnerFlorence Abena DolphyneGhana University Press, Ghana 9789964302450 168pp. 1996 $29/£19

Dictionary of Nigerian English UsageHerbert IgboanusiEnicrownfit Publishers, Nigeria 9789783422551 320pp. 2002 $51/£34

A Dictionary of the Yoruba LanguageEdited by Nigeria University PressUniversity Press, Nigeria, Nigeria 9789780307608 476pp. 2001 $52/£40

Dictionnaire Dan - Français (dan de l’Est)Valentin VydrineMeaBooks Inc, Canada 9780993996900 370pp. 2015 $39/£26

Dictionnaire Dan – Français (dan de l’Ouest)Anna Erman, Japhet Kahouye LohMeaBooks Inc, Canada 9780993996993 274pp. 2015 $34/£24

Durorp-English DictionaryEkpe InyangLangaa RPCIG, Cameroon 9789956790944 188pp. 2013 $31/£23

Essentials of Yoruba GrammarOladele, AwobuluyiUniversity Press, Nigeria, Nigeria 9780195753004 176pp. 1982 $31/£24

A Fulfulde-English DictionaryI.A. MukoshyHEBN Publishers, Nigeria 9789780812249 644pp. 2014 $64/£44

A Grammar of Contemporary IgboE. Nolue EmenanjoM & J Grand Orbit Communications, Nigeria 9789785412734 682pp. 2015 $50/£35

Manding-English Dictionary. Maninka, Bamana Vol. 1.Valentin VydrineMeaBooks Inc, Canada 9780993996924 312pp. 2015 $39/£29

Modern Hausa-English DictionaryEdited by Paul NewmanUniversity Press, Nigeria, Nigeria 9780195753035 168pp. 1979 $26/£19

Tee-English DictionaryWilson Kpakpan Nwi-BariOnyoma Research Publications, Nigeria 9789783507579 84pp. 2002 $19/£11

Dictionaries, Phrase Books & Grammar Guides


Literature

Seasons of HomeOka Benard Osahon

Come and capture the scents of the seasons in the air;The dry tang of the harmattan swirling from the face of the Sahara;orThe wet chill of the rains, billowing among mangroves and swampsfrom the shores of the Atlantic.

See the dust arise like old battle lords; scimitars upraised,Rushing through the streets, sweeping aside ancient foes of debrisand rocks.Hear the haunting, whistling melody of its song echoing like a lostvoice in the air.Feel the sharp stabs on your skin, as it tests your defenses, and blindsyour sight.

Or, you can watch clouds gather in angry congress and summon oldwindsFrom the face of the sea to make the earth bow; to make the worldkneel.You can listen the rains pound its fury on the earth like the march ofan army, bentOn annihilating everything, everything that clings to the earth.You can feel the wetness of heaven’s tears on your cold skin asfingers slip beneathTo cling to your bones and fold you into a cocoon of shiveringsteam.

Come and capture the dusty suns of the harmattanOr chain the cloudy moons of the rains.Come and trace the ancient battles lying between the dunes and thewaves;The scarred bones floating on the flowing sands of the Sahara;The tragic ships bestriding the ghostly monuments of the Atlantic’scorals.Come and feel the elemental might of the children of the desert andthe sea.

Oka Benard Osahon is a creative writer, poet and fantasy novel addict from Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria. His poetry has been published in Brittlepaper, Kalahari Review, Visual Verse and Spillwords. He was one of the winners of Praxis Magazine’s 2016 Anthology Contest and the winner of Brigitte Poirson Poetry Contest, June, 2017 edition. He lives and works in Abuja where he writes at night after work.


Best “New” African Poets 2017 AnthologyEdited by Tendai Rinos Mwanaka and Daniel da Purificação

Best “New” African Poets 2017 Anthology is the third in a continuing series. Included in this 2017 anthology are poems from 191 poets, 338 poems/translations and articles on poetry.

Contributions are included in English, Portuguese, French, Shona, Afrikaans, Kiswahili, Yoruba, Igbo, Akan Twi, Setswana, Mbesa, Dholuo and Spanish. The poets are from 40 African countries and the Diasporas with Nigerian poets dominating, but also there are substantial entries from Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Angola and Uganda. With the remainder of the poems coming from African poets based in Togo, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cuba, Mexico, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Malawi, Tanzania, Ghana, DRC, Congo Brazzaville, Taiwan, Korea, China, UK, France, USA, Gabon, Ethiopia, Switzerland, South Sudan, Sudan, Equatorial Guinea, Cabo Verde, Tunisia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, São Tomé, Brazil and Mozambique.

Tendai. R. Mwanaka is a multi-disciplinary artist from Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe. His work has been published in over 300 journals, anthologies and magazines in over 27 countries. Nominated, shortlisted and won some prizes and work has been translated into French and Spanish.

Daniel da Purificação is a citizen of the world. He loves to talk, love, read, think and write without relent. He is a professor and freelance journalist. His interests are broad range, including society, philosophy, politics, education and democracy.

614 pages | 229 x 152 mm | 2018 | Mwanaka Media and Publishing, ZimbabwePaperback: 978-0-7974-8490-0 $48/£34

New Title


Abdilatif Abdalla: Poet in Politics Edited by Rose Marie Beck and Kai Kresse

Abdilatif Abdalla: Poet in Politics celebrates the work of Abdilatif Abdalla, one of Kenya’s most well-known poets and a committed political activist.

It includes commentary essays on aspects of Abdilatif Abdalla’s work and life, through inter-weaving perspectives on poetry and politics, language and history; with contributions by East African writers and scholars of Swahili literature, including Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Said Khamis, Ken Walibora, Ahmed Rajab, Mohamed Bakari, and Sheikh Abdilahi Nassir, among others.

Abdalla became famous in 1973, with the publication of Sauti ya Dhiki (Voice of Agony), a collection of poems written secretly in prison during three years of solitary confinement (1969-72). He was convicted of circulating pamphlets against Jomo Kenyatta’s KANU government, criticizing it as ‘dictatorial’ and calling for political resistance in the pamphlet, ‘Kenya: Twendapi?’ (Kenya: where are we heading?). His poetry epitomizes the ongoing currency of classic Swahili form and language, while his work overall, including translations and editorships, exemplifies a two-way mediation between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ perspectives. It makes old and new voices of Swahili poetry and African literature accessible to a wider readership in East Africa, and beyond. Abdalla has lived in exile since 1973, in Tanzania, London, and subsequently, until now, in Germany. Nevertheless, Swahili literature and Kenyan politics have remained central to his life.

Rose Marie Beck is Professor of African Languages and Literatures at the University of Leipzig.

Kai Kresse is Associate Professor of African and Swahili Studies at Columbia University, New York.


Best Seller


Can We Talk and Other StoriesShimmer Chinodya

Shimmer Chinodya, winner of the 1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa region) is one of Zimbabwe’s foremost fiction writers. This collection of short stories reveals his development as a writer of passionate questioning integrity.

The first stories, ‘Hoffman Street’ and ‘The Man who Hanged Himself ’ capture the bewildered innocence of a child’s view of the adult world, where behaviour is often puzzling and contradictory; stories such as ‘Going to See Mr B.V.’ provide the transition between the world of the adult and that of the child where the latter is required to act for himself in a situation where illusions flounder on a narrow reality. ‘Among the Dead’ and ‘Brothers and Sisters’ look wryly at the self-conscious, self-centred, desperately serious world of young adulthood while ‘Playing your Cards’, ‘The Waterfall’, ‘Strays’ and ‘Bramson’ introduce characters for whom ambition, disillusion, and disappointment jostle for attention in a world where differences of class, culture, race and morality come to the fore. Finally, in ‘Can we Talk’ we conclude with an abrasive, lucid, sinewy voice which explores the nature of estrangement. The charge is desolation.

Shimmer Chinodya’s first novel, Dew in the Morning, was published in 1982. This was followed by Farai’s Girls (1984), Child of War (under the pen name B. Chirasha, 1986), Harvest of Thorns (1989), Can We Talk and other stories (1998), Tale of Tamari (2004), Chairman of Fools (2005), Strife (2006), Tindo’s Quest (2011), Chioniso and other stories (2012) and Harvest of Thorns Classic: A Play (2016). His work appears in numerous anthologies. He has also written educational texts, training manuals, radio and film scripts,

including the script for the feature film, Everyone’s Child. He has won many awards for his work, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region) for Harvest of Thorns, a Caine Prize shortlist for Can we Talk and the NOMA award for publishing in Africa for Strife. He has won awards on many occasions from ZIWU, ZBPA and NAMA.

148 pages | 210 x 140 mm | 2018 new. ed. | Weaver Press, ZimbabwePaperback: 978-1-779223-15-9 $16/£12eBook: 978-1-779223-16-6 $9.99/£6.99

ALSO AVAILABLE:

Harvest of ThornsShimmer Chinodya

The 1990 Commonwealth Writers Regional Prize voted Harvest of Thorns the winner in the Best Book category. Harvest of Thorns tells the story of Benjamin Tichafa who grows up in Rhodesia in the 1960s. From a conservative, religious family, but exposed to the heady ideas of the black nationalist movements, the young student is pulled in different directions. Isolated and troubled at boarding school, he is provoked into leaving, making his way to Mozambique, and joining the freedom fighters.

312 pages | 210 x 140 mm | 2018 new ed.Weaver Press, ZimbabwePb: 978-1-779223-27-2 $17/£12eBook: 978-1-779223-28-9 $9.99/£6.99

New Title


Book Review: A CAsuAlty of Power, Stephanie Lämmert, Comparing the Copperbelt

Since the privatization of the Zambian copper mines in the late 1990s, Chinese contractors have become heavily involved in the copper industry as well as in other sectors of

the Zambian economy, including construction and agriculture.

Large-scale investments in tax-free zones have brought economic prosperity for Zambia, but there is at least an equal amount of criticism. Chinese investors have been criticized on account of unsafe working conditions, violations of the Zambian labour law including salaries too low to survive on, and the use of abusive language and beatings. Tensions between Chinese supervisors and owners and Zambian mine-workers have resulted in a number of violent clashes, the most prominent being the shooting at the then Chinese-owned Collum Coal Mine in 2010 that left thirteen Zambian miners injured and the subsequent protests two years later during which one Chinese mine manager died.

In the streets of the Zambian copper towns, I hear all sorts of half-truths and rumours about “the Chinese”, and not surprisingly, Chinese are mostly portrayed in a reductionist way. For instance, one of the rumours has it that the Chinese who come to work and live in Zambia are ex-prisoners who have been expelled from China with no option to return. According to the rumour, the Zambian government has agreed to accommodate these personae non gratae, who are now exploiting Zambia’s mineral wealth and work force as well as harassing Zambian women. Balanced accounts of the Zambian-Chinese encounter are rare. One of them is Mukuka Chipanta’s debut novel A Casualty of Power (2016), published by Weaver Press, the Zimbabwean publishing house that recently had a major success with Tendai Huchu’s delightful debut The Hairdresser of Harare (2010). Mukuka Chipanta is a “son of Kitwe” and is now based in the States working as an aerospace engineer. He chose the subject of his debut in what he refers to in an interview with Radio Incenglo as a “clash of cultures”. Yet his narrative about the Zambian-Chinese encounter in the mining industry is a balanced and careful one, a successful attempt to move away from a one-sided portrayal of “Zambian victims” and “Chinese exploiters.” As it turns out, the “clash of cultures” that Chipanta had on his mind is as much the one between common Zambian mineworkers and opportunistic union activists and government officials turning a blind eye on labour law violations as it is the one between Zambians and “the Chinese”.

Chipanta grew up in Kitwe during the boom times of the mining industry, a time that is remembered for prosperity and expansion of state services in the sectors of health and education. But he also witnessed the decline of the mining sector due to sinking copper prices, and eventually the privatization of mines and the growing Chinese influence since the 1990s.

The storyline of A Casualty of Power revolves around the main character Hamoonga Moya. Hamoonga, a resident of Kitwe from a humble background raised by a single mother in Kwacha, one of Kitwe’s most notorious townships, moves to Lusaka to study journalism. He is the first one in his family to attend college

and he has high hopes. He enjoys his studies and makes friends. He is also involved in a discussion group with a handful of other students. This is perhaps the most engaging part of the novel. In vivid portrayals of the students’ debates, who have differing opinions on the Chinese presence in Zambia, Chipanta presents a nuanced, multi-perspective narrative. One of the recurring tropes in these discussions and in the novel as a whole is the role that the Zambian government plays in all of this. His (fictitious) government turns a blind eye to violations of the labour law and safety requirements and is involved in large-scale corruption.

Hamoonga’s hopes for a prosperous future are shattered as he gets in the way of a high government official. He ends up as a political prisoner and serves several years in jail where he experiences brutal torture. After his prison sentence, a broken and destitute Hamoonga returns to his home town Kitwe. Without having finished his degree, he has no other opportunity but to take up a job in a Chinese-owned mine as an unskilled labourer. Soon he gets involved in organized protest. He rises to become the number one spokesperson of the labour movement, unafraid of both the Chinese mine owners and the Zambian government officials and unionists. But soon he finds himself again trapped in the dangerous web of politics and corruption. Hamoonga’s life is full of hardships, yet there are various humorous passages in the novel, and especially at the end one cannot miss the glimpse of hope Chipanta weaves into his narrative.

Chipanta’s portrayal of the Chinese main character of the story, Jinan Hu, is another example of his careful attempt to look at the problem from various perspectives. The novel starts off with a violent scene in which Jinan Hu shoots and kills one Zambian mine-worker during a labour protest. But through the pages, the reader gets to see Jinan from a different perspective. His and his family’s struggle to eke out a living in one of China’s megacities and Jinan’s tragic loss of his wife and son in an accident has turned the decent husband and father into a sad and bitter man.

Although A Casualty of Power is a work of fiction, the story has various not always subtle references to Zambia’s recent political history, the most curious being the failed coup attempt against the first president in 1980. Another is the analogy that several characters in the novel draw between the struggle for independence, a struggle whose base were the strong trade unions, and the new struggle against neoliberalism and its foreign investors, many of them Chinese. While in both struggles the grievances were similar, the ones responsible for the conditions in the mines have changed. It is no longer the colonial government, but the Zambian one that must be held responsible. Chipanta’s account could be interpreted as a critique of Zambia’s ruling class and its unions that have grown into opportunistic self-serving organizations.

Despite all the historical references A Casualty of Power, is a piece of fiction with all the liberties that come with it, and that is what it makes is such a good read. Mukuka Chipanta’s debut is a thoughtful piece of fiction and interestingly written, if albeit the countless tragedies in Hamoonga Moya’s life leave the reader exhausted. It is a very welcome contribution not only to the debate about Chinese-Zambian relations, but also to the Zambian literary world, and African literature in general.


A Casualty of PowerMukuka Chipanta

He boarded the inter-city bus and set off on the six-hour journey to Lusaka – Christopher Columbus en route to discover a new world.’

Hamoonga Moya’s journey would take him a long way from the township of his youth on the Zambian Copperbelt. Life in the capital brought him new friends, and new ideas, and his journalism studies introduced him to ethical dilemmas. Should we take sides when looking at the social impact of the Chinese-owned mines? Who should we blame for the impoverishment of our citizens – the new owners, or the government that made the sale? Is a stadium worth more than a hospital? Outside the classroom, Hamoonga’s life, and his hopes for the future, were soon entangled in a web of greed, international crime, and betrayal. Only in the end will he know who his true friends are.

“With wit and keen observation, A Casualty of Power explores how two worlds collide as modern day Africa embraces Chinese overseas expansion. Mukuka Chipanta’s debut novel is wonderfully thought provoking, sombre and dark in places and yet laced throughout with hope.”

- Ekow Duker, author of Dying in New York and White Wahala.

“In A Casualty of Power, Mukuka Chipanta explores, in an honest and unapologetic way, subjects that societies often prefer to keep buried. This is a pacy, emotive and enjoyable novel that will keep the reader engaged until the last page.”

- Ellen Banda-Aaku, Penguin Prize Winning Author for African Writing

“A Casualty of Power is set in Chipanta’s home country Zambia, between 2005 and 2012, and portrays a country in moral decay: corruption, greed, torture and treason rule over society. And, as in many other postcolonial African novels, it is especially ordinary people who suffer from these conditions. Therefore, the novel may leave the reader rather pessimistic, but it is a very gripping and well written story.“

- Gilbert Braspenning, Africa Book Link

Mukuka Chipanta is an Aerospace Engineer and Program Manager currently residing in the Washington DC metro area with his lovely wife Sandra. Born in Zambia, he spent his formative years in the mineral rich Copperbelt Province near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. His passion for telling stories originates from many nights as a boy spent listening to the colourful tales told by members of his expansive family. He is currently working on a number of

new writing projects which he hopes you will be able to read in the not-too-distant future. A Casualty of Power is his first published novel.

216 pages | 216 x 140 mm | 2016 | Weaver Press, ZimbabwePaperback: 978-1-77922-297-8 $16/£12 / eBook: 978-1-77922-298-5 $9.99/£6.99

New Title


Book Review: Grace and other stories, Farai Mudzingwa, thisiafrica.me

Zimbabwe has a literature of migrant writers. While some have lost their voices by moving away, in a manner

that reflects emigration’s blessing and curse, some have discovered theirs. Bongani Sibanda writes from that destination of mixed fortunes, Johannesburg.

Bongani has so much to say and he wants to say it all. The phrase ‘writer’s block’ has popularised the image of the frustrated writer searching in vain for words. A lesser-known struggle is the process of sifting through the clutter, to glean the gems from the rubble; to leave the bare essentials that carry your story efficiently. The latter usually comes with experience and, sometimes, with age. Bongani Sibanda, who is now based in Johannesburg and was born in 1990 in a rural area in the south of Zimbabwe, has time on his side.

Grace & Other Stories is a debut collection of 10 short stories. Into the stories that depict life in a rural setting are woven universal social and personal themes: The role of religion and superstition, non-governmental organisations and political propaganda, migration, familial responsibility and social progression are interrogated, at times jarringly.

Migrations

In the opening story, ‘Grace’, the central character, Mlungisi, is on a brief visit back to Zimbabwe from Johannesburg.

A former life is perceived through the filter of one who has moved on; someone who has ‘progressed’.

Looking to the north, south and west, Mlungisi was surprised by the darkness. It felt strange that he’d grown up in a place like this. He thought he’d never get used to so much darkness, even if he were to stay at home for a year.

In a way, this opening story sets the tone for the collection. The stories have a feeling of retrospection. They are all told by a writer who is now living in Johannesburg and is recalling his previous life in a village in southern Zimbabwe. A former life is perceived through the filter of one who has moved on; someone who has ‘progressed’.

As can be expected of a first offering,

the autobiography is thinly veiled. There are many common threads running through different stories: the Johannesburg immigrant, the wandering male character, the disjointed family. In the southern and western regions of Zimbabwe, the economic trek down to South Africa, to Johannesburg in particular, has been a rite of passage for generations.

In ‘Zedeck’s Estrangement’, Bongani walks us through the strife, aspirations and anxiety of a region sustained by remittances from those who have migrated to cities local and foreign. The psychological trauma this visits on the migrants and those they leave behind is beautifully told through Zedeck. The writer leads us through the story with the familiarity of one who has borne the burden – and still does.

First the departure:

He had imagined himself rich with the world at his fingertips, coming home only to flaunt his wealth and show largesse.

And then the return:

It was the dread of the ignominy of death after an empty life and the peculiar preference for dying alone, out of sight, that led their son to disappear so quickly; that had led him to stay in Johannesburg unwilling to return home until deportation forced him back. It comforted them to think that he might still be alive, living off wild fruits in the mountains or begging in a town.

A desperate people

Religion is a prominent feature throughout the collection; specifically the loud, colourful and overly dramatic religions that have sprung up following the misfortune of the Zimbabwean economy over the past decade. The theatrics in ‘The Service’, all designed to squeeze scarce dollars from even the most miserly in the poor congregation, and seemingly to sow division, seem plausible even in the grandest depictions.

The author has a masterful use of dialogue; an intimate skill derived from a lived experience.

A squat man from St Josephs followed: the Binga prophet told him that his closest neighbour and friend had planted the paw of a baboon in his sorghum field to make his crop fail. Secondly, he warned, one of his children would unexpectedly fall sick and die before the end of the year. It would be bewitched by the same neighbour and friend to make a goblin from the child’s soul.

All part of the weekly spectacle.

An audience imagined

To the reader familiar with rural life, the writer may at times seem to be overemphasising or overexplaining the countryside setting. This may stem from a passion for detail or perhaps from a need to illustrate the landscape to an imagined urban audience. Whatever the reasons may be, in some parts the detail tends to distract from the story being shared.

As if in anticipation of this criticism, in ‘The Woman’, Bongani drops a stunning and sublime commentary on patriarchy. In this story he switches off his filters, immerses himself in the homestead, puts the reader on the veranda with the couple and lays bare the ties that bind their union. This is Bongani Sibanda at his best.

With a curtsey, she told him that food was ready. …She fetched her husband’s chair from the veranda and carried it to the front of the kitchen. Then she brought the food over to him.

‘I was talking to SaStodlana today,’ he said while they were eating.‘Yes.’He was quiet for some time, chewing patiently, as if he’d forgotten that he started a conversation.‘You went to see SaStodlana today,’ she urged him to continue.

The author has a masterful use of dialogue; an intimate skill derived from a lived experience. The dialogue delivers the story and message effortlessly. Layers of meaning float effortlessly between the lines.

‘I’m also sorry about hitting you last night, I’m sorry. It will never happen again, it’s just that … you know …’‘I crossed the line,’ the woman said. You made it clear that you don’t want a woman who comes home after dusk. I shouldn’t have let NaPhumzile keep me. I’m sorry too.’‘Your water is getting cold.’‘You know, you’re a very good woman. I shouldn’t be losing my temper like this.’‘It’s a man’s job to keep their woman in line,’ she said.

Grace & Other Stories is a debut collection from a talented author experimenting with style and voice. In the author’s words, “I spend my time mostly writing and reading, which is all I have to do. I’ve got my beautiful little shack in which I shut myself up and read for as long as I care to.”


Grace and Other StoriesBongani Sibanda

This collection of short stories explores the ‘survival of the fittest’ in the hardship and poverty of a remote village in Matabeleland.

Bongani Sibanda draws his characters and their situations with a sardonic eye and caustic humour. Sibanda satirises churches which enrich their leaders with the tithes of the poor, and draws our attention to self-proclaimed pastors who use the ‘gospel of nationalism and patriotism’ to persuade their congregations to desist from supporting opposition politics. The church is also a source of the villagers’ weekly entertainment, with its cleansing ceremonies and the interrogation of witches: belief has a place, but so too does theatre. Patriarchy, family hierarchies, and the traditional position of women and children, all fall under Sibanda’s wry but compassionate scrutiny. We feel an intimacy with the villagers as we learn about how they cope: with no self-pity, little ambition, but a fierce determination to survive.

“Bongani Sibanda’s debut evokes contemporary village life with precision and an unforgettable freshness. Here are soul-stirring individual and collective stories of villagers, and just in the background, a country failing the hopes of its people. A talented new voice.”

- NoViolet Bulawayo, author of We Need New Names

Bongani Sibanda was born in Mfila Village and attended Zwehamba and Nyashongwe Primary Schools, then Tshelanyemba and Shashane High Schools. He currently lives in Johannesburg. His stories have appeared in several online literary magazines, and have been included in two of Weaver Press’ anthologies, Writing Lives (2014) and Writing Mystery and Mayhem (2015). Sibanda was long-listed for the 2015 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize for ‘Musoke’, a fictionalised account of Uganda’s Dominic Ongwen. He is currently writing a novel.

120 pages | 216 x 140 mm | 2016 | Weaver Press, ZimbabwePaperback: 978-1-779223-09-8 $13.00/£9.00eBook: 978-1-779223-09-8 $9.99/£6.99

New Voice


Moving On and other Zimbabwean storiesEdited by Jane Morris

Moving On bristles with the talent of writers from Zimbabwe. This collection brings together twenty of Zimbabwe’s finest storytellers, from within the country and without.

Many of the characters in this anthology are themselves moving on: from the chains of the past, from the loss of loved ones, from long-held beliefs. Some from life itself and others to a brighter future. Between the covers the reader will encounter the father who uses his take on democracy to name the family dog, the villager who desperately waits for shoes and salt to ward off witchcraft, the young man who flees with the book, the boys who hide from the big noise, and a host of other characters.

The featured writers are: Togara Muzanenhamo; Mzana Mthimkhulu; Bryony Rheam; Thabisani Ndlovu; John Eppel; Melissa Tandiwe Myambo; Raisedon Baya; Donna Kirstein; Christopher Mlalazi; T.L. Huchu; Patricia Brickhill; Tariro Ndoro; Christopher Kudyahakudadirwe; Ignatius Mabasa; Barbara Mhangami-Ruwende; Bongani Kona; Adrian Fairbairn; Murenga Joseph Chikowero; Gamu Chamisa; and Blessing Musariri

192 pages | 216 x 140 mm | 2017 | amabooks Publishers, ZimbabwePaperback: 978-0-7974-8879-3 $19/£15

AccidentDawn Garischt

“Dawn Garisch is boldly imaginative and thought provoking in this riveting account of a performance artist whose shocking acts challenge us to question important social issues.” - Kate Gottgens

Carol Trehorne’s only child, Max, is in ICU with severe burns. Max, a performance artist, has set himself alight. He recovers but it becomes clear that he is planning further performances that will put him at risk of serious injury or death. Carol, a single parent and a GP in a busy suburban practice, is worried that her son is not the genius his friends think he is, but might be on drugs or going psychotic. As she discusses her concerns with her son’s psychiatrist, she wonders if her past behaviour, in particular her relationship with the adventurous and anti-social Jack, has influenced Max’s determination to use his body as a site of violent

art in the pursuit of revelation. Carol cannot accept that Max’s self-harm will have any effect other than to add to the meaningless violence in the world. Accident raises questions about what kind of life is worth living and what death is worth dying. It explores the different responses artists and scientists can have to violence and self-destructive behaviour, and throws into sharp relief the difficulties parents face when their children make decisions that appear incomprehensible.

284 pages | 198 x 129 mm | 2017 | Modjaji Books, South AfricaPaperback: 978-1-928215-33-2 $18/£12 / eBook: 978-1-928215-34-9 $9.99/£6.99

New Title

New Title


The Crows will TellNgewa - parables and fables - from the Akamba of KenyaEdited by Jane Morris

This book presents a collection of Ngewa - parables and fables - from the Akamba of Kenya. Fables and parables are central to African culture.

Most of those included in this collection are set in ancient times and a few are new, since Ngewa have continued to evolve and change with time to fit new socio-economic and economic circumstances. The themes and their profound messages serve as constant encouragement and reminders of what society expects of individuals.

Muli wa Kyendo is an author and the founder of Syokimau Cultural Centre, a non-profit organization which promotes culture, research and writing as a conservation method. The Centre’s project, the Syokimau Cultural Center and Museum is a UNESCO World Decade for Cultural Development activity. His early books include Whispers and

The Surface Beneath (Longman). He has also written and published children story books and plays. The play, “The Woman of Nzaui” was performed to great media acclaim.

90 pages | 203 x 127 mm | 2017 | Syokimau Cultural Centre, KenyaPaperback: 978-9966-7020-3-6 $17/£14

The Man who Cursed the Windand other stories from the KarooJosé Manuel de Prada-Samper

A revolution in the concepts of Bushman traditions and a gem of Southern African oral literature.” - Sigrid Schmidt, Folklorist

This is a selection of tales gathered in Afrikaans from present-day Karoo storytellers. They animate the harsh but beautiful landscape with lively characters like cunning Jackal, silly Hyena, dangerous Water Snake and the sinister Foot-Eyes. Such tales were first documented among |xam hunter-gatherers in the 1870s by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. Unexpectedly they have survived, affirming a strong and continuing tradition of oral storytelling in South Africa. They are presented here with English translations.

José Manuel de Prada-Samper is a renowned, well-published Spanish folklorist and translator. He came across the Bleek and Lloyd Collection in the late 1980s and since

then has been researching the history and culture of people living in the Karoo. He is a Research Associate in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cape Town.

358 pages | 134 x 156 mm | 2017 | African Sun Press, South AfricaPaperback: 978-0-620-73104-1 $30/£20

New Title

New Title


Collective Amnesia Koleka Putuma

How many abortions have fallen out of your mouthwhile counting the men in your life?

Madness sits at the dinner table, too, saying grace with one eye open.

This highly-anticipated debut collection from one of the country’s most acclaimed young voices marks a massive shift in South African poetry. Koleka Putuma’s exploration of blackness, womanhood and history in Collective Amnesia is fearless and unwavering. Her incendiary poems demand justice, insist on visibility and offer healing. In them, Putuma explodes the idea of authority in various spaces – academia, religion, politics, relationships – to ask what has been learnt and what must be unlearnt.

Through grief and memory, pain and joy, sex and self-care, Collective Amnesia is a powerful appraisal, reminder and revelation of all that has been forgotten and ignored, both in South African society, and within ourselves.

“Collective Amnesia is a work of immense power, from a voice that is sure only to grow louder as Putuma steps deeper into the light she has already begun to cast.”

- Maneo Mohale, Mail & Guardian , South Afirica

Koleka Putuma was born in Port Elizabeth in 1993. An award-winning performance poet, facilitator and theatre-maker, her plays include UHM and Mbuzeni, as well as two two plays for children, Ekhaya and Scoop. Her work has travelled around the world, with her poetry garnering her national prizes, such as the 2014 National Poetry Slam Championship and the 2016 PEN South Africa Student Writing Prize. Koleka currently lives and works in Cape Town.

114 pages | 203 x 133 mm | 2017 | uHlanga Press, South AfricaPaperback: 978-0-620-73508-7 $16/£12

Best Seller


The HeresiadSong of ReasonIkeogu Oke

The Heresiad by Ikeogu Oke was the 2017 winner of The Nigeria Prize for Literature.

The poet employs the epic form in questioning power and freedom and probes metaphorically the inner workings of societies and those who shape them. The book speaks to an intense commitment to innovation, tenacity, joyful experimentation and social commentary in a way that provokes delight and engagement.

“In The Heresiad Ikeogu Oke has set himself a lofty task: a defence of literature against cant and its attendant forces that daily seek to limit the sphere of what is beautiful and possible. He achieves this beautifully in what he describes as “operatic poetry”, a bold mixture of verse and song and drama, contained within a disciplined lyrics; pentameric form. In line after line one is startled by Ikeogu Oke’s clarity and depth of thought, and one is reminded of why we need poetry and poets in our world. The is a remarkable and ground-breaking achievement.”

- Helon Habila, winner of the Caine Prize and Wyndham Campbell Prize

“Reading Ikeogu Oke one is made aware that the map of literature knows no boundaries. The Heresiad with its Biblical cadences sings with prophecy, wisdom and lament. The poet explores varied themes including censorship, the single-minded madness of extreme religious fundamentalism and the very nature of scepticism and independent thought. Mr Oke handles heroic couplets like a master swordsman, whose rapier thrusts both provoke and excite. Thought is never a stagnant pool in this poet’s world.”

- Don Burness, Author of Red Flowers in the Sand

Ikeogu Oke won the 2017 Nigeria Prize for Literature with The Heresiad. His poems and other writings have appeared in journals, anthologies and other publications worldwide. He has performed his poems at various fora in Nigeria, South Africa and the United States, including as a special performance poet guest of Brown University in 2014. He graduated with a BA in English and Literary Studies from the University of Calabar and an MA in Literature from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. In 2010, Nadine Gordimer, the winner of the 1991 Noble Prize in Literature, selected Salutes without Guns,

his second collection of poems, as her Book of the Year for the Times Literary Supplement.

114 pages | 216 x 140 mm | 2018 | Manila Publishers Company, NigeriaPaperback: 978-978-54688-4-7 $16/£13

New Title


Cheney-Coker, Syl

Stone Child and Other PoemsHEBN Publishers, Nigeria 9789780812089 108pp. 2008 $23/£18

Chimombo, Steve

The Wrath of NapoloWASI Publications, Malawi 9789990848069 608pp. 2000 $46/£34

Chinodya, Shimmer

Can We Talk and Other StoriesWeaver Press, Zimbabwe 9781779223159 148pp. 2018 $16/£12

Chairman of FoolsWeaver Press, Zimbabwe 9781779220417 196pp. 2005 $23/£18

Chioniso and Other StoriesWeaver Press, Zimbabwe 9781779221704 190pp. 2012 $23/£18

Harvest of ThornsWeaver Press, Zimbabwe 9781779223272 312pp. 2018 $17/£12

StrifeWeaver Press, Zimbabwe 9781779222671 244pp. 2014 $17/£14

Tale of TamariWeaver Press, Zimbabwe 9781779220264 76pp. 2003 $17/£10

Clark, J.P.

All for OilMalthouse Press, Nigeria 9789780231323 84pp. 2000 $26/£18

The Bikoroa PlaysUniversity Press, Nigeria9789780307165 144pp.1985 $17/£13

Darko, Amma

FacelessSub-Saharan Publishers, Ghana 9789988550509 236pp. 2003 $31/£18

Not Without FlowersSub-Saharan Publishers, Ghana 9789988647131 369pp. 2007 $38/£26

Ekwensi, Cyprian

IskaSpectrum Books, Nigeria 9789782462725 224pp. 1996 $26/£21

Jagua Nana’s DaughterSpectrum Books, Nigeria 9789782460431 256pp. 1993 $26/£21

Hove, Chenjerai

Blind MoonWeaver Press, Zimbabwe 9781779220196 76pp. 2003 $26/£18

Ike, Chukwuemeka

The Potter’s WheelUniversity Press, Nigeria 9789782492838 224pp. 1993 $26/£16

Sunset at Dawn. A Novel of the Biafran WarUniversity Press, Nigeria 9789782492821 256pp. 1993 $26/£21

To My Husband from IowaUniversity Press, Nigeria 9789782601438 272pp. 1996 $29/£22

Mlalazi, Chris

They are ComingWeaver Press, Zimbabwe 9781779222589 152pp. 2014 $15.95/£12.95

Dancing with Life. Tales from the Townshipamabooks, Zimbabwe 9780797435902 88pp. 2008 $23/£17

Mungoshi, Charles

Some Kinds of WoundsMambo Press, Zimbabwe 9780869221570 180pp. 1980 $19/£16

Waiting for the RainZimbabwe Publishing House 9780949932020 184pp. 1991 $19/£14

Walking StillBaobab Books, Zimbabwe9780908311996 176pp. 1997 $19/£14

Ogot, Grace

Land Without ThunderEast African Educational Publishers, Kenya9789966465887 156pp. 1988 $16/£12

The Other WomanEast African Educational Publishers, Kenya9789966469885 252pp. 1992 $31/£22

The Promised LandEast African Educational Publishers, Kenya9789966467713 208pp. 1991 $16/£11

Ojaide, Tanure

The Beauty I Have Seen. A TrilogyMalthouse Press, Nigeria9789788422297 156pp. 2010 $26/£18

Delta Blues and Other Home SongsKraft Books, Nigeria9789782081773 96pp. 2002 $24/£15

God’s Medicine Men and Other StoriesMalthouse Press, Nigeria

9789780231378 168pp. 2004 $23/£14

I Want to Dance and Other PoemsAfrican Heritage Press, Nigeria9780962886454 92pp. 2003 $21/£15

Osofisan, Femi

Once Upon Four RobbersHEBN Publishers, Nigeria9789781291791 124pp. 1999 $19/£10

Who’s Afraid of Solarin?University Press, Nigeria9789780691714 116pp. 2007 $26/£19

Osundare, Niyi

DaysHEBN Publishers, Nigeria9789780810672 128pp. 2008 $23/£18

The Eye of the EarthHEBN Publishers, Nigeria9789781291395 68pp. 1986 $23/£18

MoonsongsSpectrum Books, Nigeria9789782460172 84pp. 1988 $25/£19

Waiting LaughtersNiyi Osundare, Nigeria9789782601407 104pp. 1990 $19/£16

p’Bitek, Okot

The Defence of LawinoFountain Publishers, Uganda9789970022694 132pp. 2001 $24/£18

Two Songs: Song of Prisoner and Song of MalayaEast African Educational Publishers, Kenya9789966467201 188pp. 1988 $25/£21

White TeethEast African Educational Publishers, Kenya9789966464453 120pp. 1989 $19/£16

Saro-Wiwa, Ken

Basi and Company. A Modern African FolktaleSaros International Publishers, Nigeria9781870716000 228pp. 1987 $26/£19

The Singing Anthill. Ogoni Folk TalesSaros International Publishers, Nigeria9781870716154 144pp. 1991 $26/£16

wa Thiong’o, Ngugi

Mtawa MweusiEast African Educational Publishers, Kenya9789966460097 94pp. 2010 $23/£18

Shetani MsalabaniEast African Educational Publishers, Kenya9789966461674 278pp. 1982 $31/£23

Key Author Backlist


Children’s Books& Young Adult

Animal VillageNelda LaTeef

Animal Village has been named as one of the best independent books of 2018 by the Independent Book Publishing Professionals Group. Animal Village is an authentic folk tale from the Zarma culture of West Africa about a tortoise who saves her village from the ravages of drought with wisdom passed down from an “old story.” Nelda LaTeef ’s colorful and strikingly brilliant montage of illustrations, in acrylic and collage, captures the richness and vibrancy of the sub-Saharan culture from which the story springs.

The story is especially relevant to sub-Saharan Africa as it focuses on the devastation of drought and the importance of received knowledge. With its dual themes of wisdom and grit, the book happily entertains while it teaches the importance of hard work and persistence as keys to success.

“In her book, Animal Village, such mighty lessons Nelda LaTeef teaches the young and those of us who are not so young. Listen to the ‘old stories’ passed down from ‘the ancestors;’ it is always better to pull together rather than stand against each other; keep at a task until it is done; and everything is possible, by and by.”

- Johnnetta Betsch Cole, Director, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art

“LaTeef is an author/illustrator to watch... World folktale collections should welcome this beautifully illustrated volume.”

- Kirkus Reviews

While living in the Republic of Niger, Nelda LaTeef traveled by Land Rover to the fabled city of Timbuktu. Her children’s picture book, The Hunter and the Ebony Tree, received the Storytelling World Honor Award. It was translated into Italian, Korean, and Gaelic; and the illustrations showcased at the Society of Illustrators in New York and the McLean Project for the Arts. LaTeef studied at Harvard University and her book, Working Women for the 21st Century: Fifty Women Reveal Their Pathways to Success, was selected as recommended reading for young adults by The

New York Public Library. She lives with her family in Virginia.

36 pages | 265 x 280 mm | 2017 | Sub-Saharan Publishers, GhanaHardback: 978-9988-647-46-9 $16.95/£10

New Title


Gizo-Gizo!A Tale from the Zongo LagoonEmily Williamson

Gizo-Gizo! was awarded Best Book for young people in the 25th Children’s Africana Book Awards.

In Hausa culture, you always begin telling a story in the same way: The storyteller says, “Ga ta nan ga ta nanku!” “I am about to begin!” And the children respond, “Tazo Mujita!” “We are all ears!”

Using story as the primary learning, teaching and engagement tool, the Zongo Story Project strives to elevate proficiencies in oral, written, and visual forms of literacy; promote the knowledge building of local history, local culture and local contemporary concerns; and lay the crucial foundation for the acquisition of vital twenty-first century critical thinking skills. The conceptual framework for this project originated out of a larger, community-based initiative called the Zongo Water Project, whose mission is to use water as a way to improve the quality of life for the Zongo.

Working closely with local teachers, Emily Williamson carried out a series of educational workshops at the Hassaniyya Quranic School in the summers of 2012, 2013, and 2014 to teach students about local water and environmental concerns. Employing the story as the foundational element, Emily engaged students in dialogue, shared readings, performances, writing exercises, and visual art, culminating in community drama performances and original folktales. The illustrations and text of this book grew directly out of the work produced in these workshops.

“Overall, the book is community-created, community-centered, and community-specific, both in its creation and plot, and serves as an excellent example of relevant literature produced primarily for a particular community but valuable to a much wider audience. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.”

- African Access Review

36 pages | 255 x 255 mm | 2016 | Sub-Saharan Publishers, GhanaHardback: 978-9988-860-32-5 $14/£11

Best Seller


Amagama Enkululeko! Words for Freedom: Writing Life Under ApartheidEqual Education

Amagama Enkululeko! was awarded best new book for olders readers in the 25th Children’s Africana Books Awards.

Why did African men leave their homes to work on the mines of the Witwatersrand? How did a woman searching for her husband make a life in the city? What happened to a family or community forcibly removed from their homes or their land? How did racial classification destroy families and communities? What thoughts went through a detainee’s mind during their long hours in prison? How did black people in South Africa manage to keep the fires of resistance burning under such harsh social, political and economic conditions? How did people born into such a hopeless present keep their dignity and resolve?

With a foreword by Zakes Mda, and a mixture of famous and seemingly forgotten struggle writers, this anthology tackles the history of colonialism and Apartheid from the ground up. Through a blend of history and story-telling, it opens a window onto the ways ordinary, everyday life was shaped by the forces of history. It displays the anger, suffering, love, joy, courage and enduring humanity of ordinary people and communities striving for dignity, freedom and justice.

“Contrary to what is sometimes said, in South Africa the past is not past; it is still a strong presence in people’s lives. It is not possible to understand the present without understanding the past. Forgiving does not mean forgetting.... AMAGAMA ENKULULEKO! is a teacher’s and learner’s delight. It is well-organized and presented in a way that is bound to facilitate learning. This book is highly recommended for general readers and especially for teachers and learners.”

- Africa Access Review

258 pages | 210 x 140 mm | 2016 | Cover2Cover Books, South AfricaPaperback: 978-1-928346-35-7 $30/£20eBook: 978-1-928346-35-7 $20/£15

Award Winner


May I Have This DanceConnie Manse Ngcaba

May I Have This Dance was named an Honor Book for 2016 by the Children’s Africana Books Awards.

May I Have This Dance tells the courageous and moving story of Connie Manse Ngcaba, who grew up in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, where she became a nurse, community figurehead and a leading voice of dissent against the apartheid regime. Her sense of justice and morality, and her compassion for those around her, brought her into frequent conflict with the government, culminating in her being detained for a year without trial at the age of 57. It is also the story of the strength of family ties, and the triumph of Connie’s love for her husband and children.

“This book embodies courage and strength, but it is ultimately about love. Love of family, love of community and love of country. MaNgcaba takes us on a journey spanning eight decades of her life, having to navigate through the difficulties of life in apartheid South Africa. She teaches us the spirit of giving, selflessness and selfworth. Written with great warmth and humour. It is a heartwarming read.”

- Siki Mgabadeli, Radio and television journalist

“As accounts of South Africa’s long, difficult 20th Century proliferate, far too little space has been accorded to the women whose lives were lived at the intersection of the political, the domestic, and the personal. Connie Ngcaba helps us to correct that record in fine-grained detail, reminding us how important it is to listen to your grandmother.”

- Nic Dawes, Former editor of Mail & Guardian

“This inspiring autobiography is the story of a remarkable, strong, and courageous woman’s love of family, community, and country. It is the story of a life lived with deep compassion for all.”

- Lesego Malepe, Africa Access Review

160 pages | 216 x 140 mm | 2015 | Cover2Cover Books, South AfricaPaperback: 978-0-9922017-9-1 $19.95/£15.95

Best Seller


Never Say NeverAnthony Mugo

Anthony Mugo’s Never Say Never is a compelling story of a teenager’s quest for education under the most difficult conditions.

Daniel Muthini Njoki, the son of a poor, single mother, is arrested and taken to a remand home in Murang’a, then to Getathuru Reception Centre. He is subsequently transferred to other approved schools: Kericho, Othaya, and finally Kabete, where he sits and passes the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education. The doors to a university are now open. Although he is an innocent inmate, and although textual evidence points in the direction of the mother, the question of who engineered his arrest is part of what makes this work so unputdownable. The sum total is a superlatively well-written novel about the difficulties, the challenges, and the hopes of getting an education in Kenya.

Anthony Mugo graduated from Moi University in 2001 with BA in economics. His two stories entitled Too Innocent to Die and Not a Drop won the National Book Development Council of Kenya (NBDCK) Prize for Budding Writers in 2009 and 2010 respectively. He lives in Nairobi with his wife and two children.

165 pages | 178 x 127 mm | 2012 | Longhorn Publishers, KenyaPaperback: 978-9966-36-237-7 $23/£18 / ebook: 978-9966-31-683-7 $9.99/£6.99

Names and SecretsMark Chetambe

The story is told of Chekai, a teenage boy who survives school bullying to become a champion of peaceful coexistence in an ethnically and economically divided society.

Matur County is an example of a country that faces internal divisions, one that is under increasing danger from external threats, including terrorism. Chekai is bullied by his teacher, Ms Letia and his class prefect, Goliath. This reflects the ethnic suspicions and economic inequalities that threaten to tear the society apart. However, Chekai thinks realistically about the problems in his society. Through curiosity, he discovers that unlike what is said, the people of Matur County have a lot in common. He realises that they will only defeat their real enemies if they are

united. Chekai wins a presidential essay writing competition and becomes a peace ambassador. He uses his new position to chart a new path on which everyone will walk. This includes those who previously bullied him, and those who had been discriminated against.

Mark Chetambe developed an interest in young adults’ literature during his undergraduate days at Kenyatta University. He has made remarkable contributions to the Kenya Schools’ and Colleges’ drama festival as a script writer and director.

128 pages | 210 x 148 mm | 2015 | East African Educational Publishers, KenyaPaperback: 978-9966-56-004-9 $12/£8 / eBook: 978-9966-56-152-7 $9.99/£6.99

Burt Award

Burt Award


In Search of HappinessSonwabiso Ngcowa

“In Search of Happiness - a journey full of heartache but rich in its celebration of diversity and defence of identity. A must read in a world full of prejudice and fear.” - Redi Tlhabi, radio and television journalist

Nana is fifteen when she travels from her village in the Eastern Cape to the city. She is overjoyed to be reunited with her family, even if they are living in a tiny shack. But she struggles to fit in at her new school, and she is shocked at the violence shown to Chino and Agnes, her Zimbabwean neighbours. When she and Agnes become close friends, and find love in unexpected places, Nana learns firsthand just how brutal ignorance can be and how hard it is to hold on to happiness.

Sonwabiso Ngcowa has also had short stories published by the FunDza Literary Trust, Oxford University Press and Cover2Cover Books. He is a motivational speaker and

mentor for young people.

160 pages | 229 x 152 mm | 2014 | Cover2Cover Books, South AfricaPaperback: 978-0-9922018-0-7 $13.95/£9.95 / eBook: 978-0-9922018-6-9 $9.99/£6.99

Waste Not Your TearsVivienne Ndlovu

Wowed by the lights and prospects of city life, Loveness leaves her small mining town in search of a new life in Harare.

She imagines herself falling for a hot-shot city man becoming his wife and spending her life in luxury while tending to her city children. The man she considers the love of her life is anything but a hot shot, and he is abusive and uncaring. To top all this off, he his HIV positive. Loveness is at a crossroads. She must consider her choices.

Although, Waste Not Your Tears does not shy away from misfortune, it is also a novel of forgiveness and hope. Loveness is an unlikely heroine on a stage set during the crisis of HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe. She lives, however, amongst us, and reading

this sensitive and thoughtful novel provides insights into the challenges of making the wrong choices, but having the strength to move forward.

Vivienne Ndlovu is an Irish Zimbabwean writer who works for SAFAIDS in Harare. Her fiction includes Waste not your Tears, and the short stories ‘Homecoming’ in Writing Still (2003), ‘Kurima’ in Writing Now (2005), and ‘Bare Bones’ in Women Writing Zimbabwe (2008).

100 pages | 210 x 140 mm | 2018 | Weaver Press, ZimbabwePaperback: 978-1-77922-331-9 $16/£12 / eBook: 978-1-77922-326-5 $9.99/£6.99

Bestseller

Reissue


Mwana Mdogo wa MfalmeAntoine de Saint-ExuperyTranslated by Philipp Kruse and Walter Bgoya

This is the first translation into Swahili of one of the classics of world literature, Le Petit Prince, first published in 1946 by Editions Gallimard in Paris.

Since that time it has been translated into more than 190 languages and sold 80 million copies worldwide, and has been adapted for stage, screen and the opera. The author, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, drew on his experiences as an aviator in the Sahara desert. The narrator crashes in the Sahara where he meets the Prince and shows him his drawings, opening up the dialogue.

The story moves to the little prince’s asteroid/planet, from where he visits other asteroids each of which is inhabited by a foolish adult, and finally Earth. Through the conversations, observations of both humans, animals and the natural world, an extraordinary wisdom is imparted: a man who meets an extraordinary boy and relearns what it means to be a child; and a small boy learns of the wonders and ironies of life during the celestial odyssey. Together with the beautiful original illustrations, the timeless masterpiece opens a door for people of all ages to a new and deep philosophical understanding of life.

Le Petit Prince (Mwana Mdogo wa Mfalme) kiliandikwa na Antoine de SaintExupéry katika lugha ya Kifaransa na kuchapishwa kwa mara ya kwanza mwaka 1943.

Ingawa kijuujuu inaonekana ni kitabu cha watoto, Mwana Mdogo wa Mfalme ni hadithi inayoibua tafakuri ya kina juu ya maisha na hulka ya binadamu.

Hii ndiyo hadithi maarufu kushinda zote ulimwenguni ikiwa tayari imekwisha kutafsiriwa katika lugha 190 na nakala zaidi ya milioni 80 kuuzwa. Imependwa na kuwaburudisha wengi ulimwenguni, wakubwa kwa wadogo.

105 pages | 210 x 155 mm | Colour Illustrations | 2010 Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, TanzaniaPaperback: 978-9987-08-035-9 $22.95/£17.95

Best Seller


AcademicBooks

Academic Freedom in AfricaEdited by Mahmood MamdaniCODESRIA, Senegal9782869780309 388pp. 1993 $49/£33

Accumulation in an African PeripheryIssa G. ShivjiMkuki na Nyota Publishers, Tanzania9789987080311 110pp. 2009 $23/£18

Africa in Contemporary PerspectiveA Textbook for Undergraduate StudentsSub-Saharan Publishers, Ghana9789988647377 530pp. 2013 $57/£40

Africa’s Development Thinking Since IndependenceEdited by Africa Institute of South AfricaAfrica Institute of South Africa 9780798301763 500pp. 2002 $65/£35

Africa: Beyond RecoveryThandika MkandawireSub-Saharan Publishers, Ghana9789988860202 90pp. 2015 $19.95/£16.95

African Gender ScholarshipBibi Bakare-Yusuf, Signe ArnfredCODESRIA, Senegal9782869781382 112pp. 2004 $23/£15

African Land Questions, Agrarian Transitions and the StateSam MoyoCODESRIA, Senegal9782869782020 168pp. 2008 $29/£22

African Literature and the FutureEdited by Gbemisola AdeotiCODESRIA, Senegal9782869786332 112pp. 2015 $22/£16

African Studies in Social Movements and DemocracyEdited by Mahmood Mamdani, Ernest Wamba-dia-WambaCODESRIA, Senegal 9782869780521 636pp. 1995 $138/£85

African Universities in the Twenty-First CenturyVol 1: Liberalisation and InternationalisationVol 2: Knowledge and SocietyEdited by Adebayo O. Olukoshi, Paul Tiyambe ZelezaCODESRIA, Senegal 9782869781245 332pp. 2004 $65/£39 9782869781252 356pp. 2004 $65/£39

The Africana World. From Fragmentation to Unity and Renaissance Edited by Mammo Muchie, Sanya Osha, Matlotleng Matlou Africa Institute of South Africa9780798303118 364pp. 2012 $46/£34

Archie Mafeje. Scholar, Activist and ThinkerDani W. NabudereAfrica Institute of South Africa 9780798302869 118pp. 2011 $26/£21

The Blackman and the VeilWole SoyinkaSedco Publishing, Ghana9789964721213 84pp. 1993 $19/£10

Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa. Myths of DecolonizationSabelo J. Ndlovu-GatshenoiCODESRIA, Senegal9782869785786 308pp. 2013 $40/£29

Contemporary African Cultural ProductionsV.Y. MudimbeCODESRIA, Senegal 9782869785397 328pp. 2013 $40/£29

The Crises of Postcoloniality in AfricaEdited by Kenneth OmejeCODESRIA, Senegal9782869786028 248pp. 2015 $35/£25

Critical Perspectives on Culture and Globalisation. The Intellectual Legacy of Ali MazruiEdited by Kimani Njogu, Seifudein AdemTwaweza Communications, Kenya 9789966028679 268pp. 2017 $35/£25

Endogenous Knowledge: Research TrailsEdited by Paulin HountondjiCODESRIA, Senegal 9782869780408 388pp. 1997 $57/£39

The Feasibility of Democracy in AfricaClaude AkeCODESRIA, Senegal 9782869780828 208pp. 2000 $34/£24

Genuine Intellectuals. Academic and Social Responsibilities of Universities in AfricaBernard Nsokika FonlonLangaa RPCIG, Cameroon9789956558599 172pp. 2009 $26/£19

Indigenous Knowledge System and Intellectual Property Rights Edited by Isaac Mazonde, Thomas PradipCODESRIA, Senegal9782869781948 140pp. 2007 $33/£25

The Ink of the Scholars. Reflections on Philosophy in AfricaSouleymane Bachir DiagneCODESRIA, Senegal9782869787056 118pp. 2016 $24/£18

Kwasi Wiredu and BeyondThe Text, Writing and Thought in AfricaSanya OshaCODESRIA, Senegal9782869781504 240pp. 2005 $33/£23

Land in the Struggles for Citizenship in AfricaEdited by Sam Moyo, Dzodzi Tsikata, Yakham DiopCODESRIA, Senegal9782869786363 384pp. 2015 $40/£30

Manufacturing African Studies and CrisesPaul Tiyambe ZelezaCODESRIA, Senegal9782869780668 632pp. 1997 $65/£52

A Modern Economic History of AfricaPaul Tiyambe ZelezaCODESRIA, Senegal9782869780279 512pp. 1993 $62/£41

The Mind of AfricaW.E. AbrahamSub-Saharan Publishers, Ghana9789988550585 232pp. 2015 $29/£19

Nkrumah’s Legacy and Africa’s Triple Heritage between Globallization and Counter TerrorismAli MazruiGhana University Press, Ghana9789964302962 72pp. 2005 $26/£14

Our Continent Our Future. African Perspectives on Structural AdjustmentEdited by Thandika Mkandawire, Charles C. SoludoCODESRIA, Senegal9782869780743 192pp. 1999 $41/£26

Reclaiming the Human Sciences and Humanities through African Perspectives. Volume I & 2Edited by Helen Lauer, Kofi AnyidohoSub-Saharan Publishers, Ghana9789988647339 944pp. 2012 $82/£599789988647711 738pp. 2012 $82/£59

Reimagining Pan-AfricanismWole Soyinka, Samir Amin, Bereket Habte Selassie, Micere Githae Mugo, Thandika MkandawireMkuki na Nyota Publishers, Tanzania9789987082674 274pp. 2016 $32/£22

Scholars in the MarketplaceMahmood MamdaniCODESRIA, Senegal9782869782013 316pp. 2007 $46/£33

Social Science as ImperialismClaude AkeIbadan University Press, Nigeria9789781211300 236pp. 1982 $45/£28

The Study of AfricaVol 1: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary EncountersVol 2: Global and Transnational EngagementsEdited by Paul Tiyambe ZelezaCODESRIA, Senegal 9782869781979 496pp. 2006 $65/£52 9782869781979 496pp. 2006 $65/£52

What Colonialism Ignored‘African Potentials’ for Resolving Conflicts in Southern AfricaEdited by Sam Moyo, Yoichi MineLangaa RPCIG, Cameroon9789956763399 388pp. 2016 $40/£28

Key African Studies Backlist


New Title

Regenerating AfricaBringing African Solutions to African ProblemsMammo Muchie, Nicasius Achu Check and Samuel Oloruntoba

This book is one of the few books that addresses the real problems Africa continues to face by suggesting solutions for policy makers and all Africans.

It has been long overdue to address the principal problems that Africa continues to have. How to bring real African solutions to these problems remains unresolved. Palaeontologists have discovered that Africa is the origin of humanity. Africa has also experienced the commodification of its humanity through slavery, colonialism and apartheid.

This book on Regenerating Africa: Bringing African Solutions to African Problems addresses why Africans must come together and try to address their own problems. They must look back to the spiritual, struggle and knowledge heritage to re-imagine and innovate a new Africa with leadership, governance, systems and institutions that can address the security and well-being, the employment, social inclusion, poverty eradication and the equality of the people. In fact the key problem to find a solution is how to Africanise those that originated from Africa and those that became settlers with different racial, cultural, religious, linguistic and ethnic variations. How to manage inter-African relations? How the settlers from the colonial legacy, the apartheid legacy, the Arabs in Africa and the varied tribes within Africans can all share being Africanised above all else is a real challenge to bring lasting solutions to Africa’s enduring problems.

The contributors address in the book how African solutions to African problems in the current global context to create a sustainable African future can be thought, designed and engineered to advance the well-being of people and nature for all. The African Unity for Renaissance series of conferences that over 10 partners contributed to run is the true source for generating the quality papers that have been peer reviewed to constitute the contributions in the book to make African solutions to African problems in reality and not just in talk.

356 pages | 244 x 170 mm | 2017 | Africa Institute of South AfricaPaperback: 978-0-7983-0500-6 $40/£30


Look at the kwerekwere in the mirror: Black South Africans have embraced European ideas, so why can’t citizenship be equally fluid?

How can you tell a so-called kwerekwere from a citizen? How can one kwerekwere distinguish himself or herself from

another? How easy is it for citizens to tell one type of kwerekwere from another? Since black people constitute the vast majority of the amakwerekwere, how do black citizens avoid mistaking one another for amakwerekwere? For sure some citizens walk, laugh or dance like amakwerekwere!

Anthropologist Francis Nyamnjoh, a Cameroonian South African and a South African Cameroonian, sharply raises these and similar questions in his recently published book titled #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa – a must-read.

There is a deadly national game going on. It is the sport of spotting and stopping the amakwerekwere, naming and shaming the Mozambican “Shangaan”, taming and maiming the Nigerian, stealing and looting from the Somali businessperson, exploiting the Zimbabwean waitress and abusing the Basotho domestic.

The purpose of this national hobby is to ensure that noncitizens do not invade the sacred borders or violate what Nyamnjoh calls the imagined “borders of intimacies”.

But the national anti-kwerekwere pastime is also deadly. Among the targets of recurrent societal fits of anger, often performed through the increasingly violent theatre of protest action, are “government installations” such as libraries, schools, clinics and municipal offices. We must add the amakwerekwere to these targets.

Are these buildings perhaps considered in some communities as “foreign objects”, to be removed and expunged like the amakwerekwere? At what point will communities take ownership of them?

African foreigners are often harassed so that they do not “violate” the deeply flawed racial and ethnic purities that are artificially cobbled together. It is on these stitched-up identities and invented ethnicities, constructed with the malleable clay of citizenship in fictitious African states created by Europeans in Berlin in 1884, that the citizen-versus-kwerekwere binary depends.

At the heart of the vaunted South African black citizenship – which is used as an alibi behind which African foreign nationals can be beleaguered, persecuted and killed for no reason other than that they are “not citizens” – lies a notion of blackness which is piggybacked on theories of degrees of absorption into whiteness. At their most vulgar, the latter show up through such acts as skin bleaching and surgical nose sharpening in order to acquire the Caucasian look.

The prevalence of the stereotypical dark-skinned African kwerekwere is neither innocent nor

accidental. Similarly, it is no laughing matter that a number of dark-skinned South Africans are routinely mistaken for illegal amakwerekwere, by black police officers nogal, with some of the victims spending nights in prison while others mistakenly get “deported” back to Zimbabwe.

Hierarchical notions of blackness, in terms of which the South African black person, presumed to be the lightest-skinned of all, occupies the top spot on the pyramid, are clearly at work here.

Consider, for example, the often unspoken assertion of the superiority of English, a borrowed colonial language often deliberately construed as a local language and often used, quite unashamedly, as a key distinguisher of citizen over kwerekwere, civilised over uncivilised, educated over uneducated and intelligent over stupid.

More genuinely local languages such as isiZulu, isiXhosa and Sesotho are also used as markers and testers of who is citizen and who is not. And yet the fact that these languages are intimately related to many other languages spoken in sub-Saharan Africa is an indication that they are probably more African than they are South African.

The very label kwerekwere is a parody of the noises supposedly made by noncitizens when they speak in their languages – many of which are closer to indigenous South African languages than English, French and Portuguese are.

It is uncanny how indebted to European ideas black South Africans are in many of the things they depend on to distinguish themselves from their fellow African amakwerekwere. Radical linguistic decolonisation must take us beyond fascination with all things English all the way back to our common kwerekwere roots. Radical cultural decolonisation must take us beyond notions of renaissance, clearly borrowed from the European renaissance project, which, among other things, bequeathed us colonialism.

Nor are white South Africans above the trivialities of xenophobia. Not so long ago, the greatest divide between white South Africans was that of uitlander and burgher/boer. In fact, the boer and the uitlander never quite formed a rainbow nation together. This could explain why, to this day, we struggle to shake off the legacies of English-speaking universities and Afrikaans-speaking universities as higher education benchmarks, English-speaking churches and Afrikaans-speaking churches as the spiritual yardsticks, and English-speaking schools and Afrikaans-speaking schools as the national educational standards.

Today, white South Africans of all classes are first in the queue to exploit the cheap labour of the amakwerekwere.

The central thesis of Nyamnjoh’s #RhodesMustFall is that white people are among the more recent amakwerekwere to cross over into the physical and psychological borders of South Africa.

To make this point sharply, he focuses on the wealth and empire-building strategies of one of the most famous and most powerful white amakwerekwere, Cecil John Rhodes.

As a literary and discursive device, the summary christening of Rhodes as the model kwerekwere of all amakwerekwere yields mixed results. But it is a tactic that enables the author to discuss notions of citizenship and noncitizenship, and insiders and outsiders, in a nuanced and insightful manner.

Here is the irony we must not lose. Rhodes the kwerekwere (like his contemporary, Paul Kruger) managed not only to lose his kwerekwere status, but also to impose and inscribe himself powerfully and so thoroughly on the bodies, hearts, minds and souls of the invaded and vanquished black citizens.

Soon enough, observes Nyamnjoh, black South African citizens started “looking up to the (white) amakwerekwere as a pacesetter worthy of imitation and mimicry”. Today, black South Africans use, in part, the artefacts of their own absorption into white amakwerekwere culture to distinguish themselves from fellow Africans. The very fact that black South Africans reserve the term kwerekwere only for fellow black Africans is a sign of the extent to which they have bought into both the myth of white kwerekwere normalcy and the myth of black Africans as the only amakwerekwere.

Incidentally, Rhodes believed in the hierarchy of races, with the British and the British empire on top of the world and black people, whom he also regarded as children, at the very bottom.

To get ourselves out of the self-hating conundrum of Afrophobia, several things need to happen. We need to let go of truncated and static notions of citizenship. This means being open to more dynamic and mobile notions of citizenship between and among Africans. Surely the African citizen is not only the bloke who never leaves his country, city or village? The South Africa we have today would not exist without immigration and emigration.

We must also get rid of presumptive notions about African foreign nationals, which include seeing them as having had no life before they came to South Africa, as being unqualified, as being here to stay and being burdens to be carried rather than assets.

So, have South African born-frees, through the #RhodesMustFall movement, finally connected the dots and realised that Rhodes was as much a kwerekwere as Ernesto Nhamuave, the Mozambican “burning man” in one of the most memorable images of the 2008 xenophobic attacks?

I am not so sure. Like generations before them, the born-frees need to embrace the ironies and contradictions in the past, present and future.

Rhodes is not only “out there” but also “in here”. For Rhodes to truly fall, he must fall truly and completely inside of all of us. Now, that is easier said than done. The kwerekwere is in the citizen and the citizen is in the kwerekwere.

If you want to spot a kwerekwere, start with the man or woman in your mirror. Whoever you may be, reach out to your inner kwerekwere and let us start building expanded and dynamic notions of citizenship together. - Tinyiko Maluleke, Mail & Guardian, South Africa

#RhodesMustFall. Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South AfricaFrancis B. Nyamnjoh

“Cobbling identities may be our way of preserving ourselves in new conditions of modernity. And this is the crux of the argument that Francis Nyamnjoh presents to us here”- Michael Rowlands, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University College, London

This book on rights, entitlements and citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa shows how the playing field has not been as levelled as presumed by some and how racism and its benefits persist. Through everyday interactions and experiences of university students and professors, it explores the question of race in a context still plagued by remnants of apartheid, inequality and perceptions of inferiority and inadequacy among the majority black population. In education, black voices and concerns go largely unheard, as circles of privilege are continually regenerated and added onto a layered and deep history of cultivation of black pain. These issues are examined against the backdrop of organised student protests sweeping through the country’s universities with a renewed clamour for transformation around a rallying cry of ‘Black Lives Matter’. The nuanced complexity of this insightful analysis of the Rhodes Must Fall movement elicits compelling questions about the attractions and dangers of exclusionary articulations of belonging. What could a grand imperialist like the stripling Uitlander or foreigner of yesteryear, Sir Cecil John Rhodes, possibly have in common with the present-day nimble-footed makwerekwere from Africa north of the Limpopo? The answer, Nyamnjoh suggests, is to be found in how human mobility relentlessly tests the boundaries of citizenship.

Francis B. Nyamnjoh is Professor of Social Anthropology, at the University of Cape Town, South Africa,

310 pages | 229 x 152 mm | 2016 | Langaa RPCIG, CameroonPaperback: 978-9956-763-16-0 $34/£24eBook: 978-9956-763-42-9 $34/£24

NEW TITLE:

Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd. How Amos Tutuola Can Change Our MindsFrancis B. Nyamnjoh

“Francis Nyamnjoh invites us to rethink contemporary cosmopolitanism through strange encounters and marvellous episodes recounted in the stories of Amos Tutuola, a mid-twentieth century Nigerian Yoruba author. This might seem an endeavour more implausible than the tales themselves, but reading will change your mind.”

- Richard Fardon, Professor of West African Anthropology, SOAS,

University of London

326 pages | 229 x 152 mm | 2017Langaa RPCIG, CameroonPb: 978-9956-764-65-5 $35/£25eBook: 978-9956-764-43-3 $30/£20

Best Seller


New Title

“Little Research Value”: African Estate Records and Colonial Gaps in a Post-Colonial National ArchiveEllen Ndeshi Namhila

Ellen Ndeshi Namhila’s “Little Reasearch Value” was nominated for the ASA UK’s 2018 Fage and Oliver Prize 2018

Ellen Ndeshi Namhila is intrigued by the question: Why can the National Archives of Namibia respond to genealogical enquiries of Whites in a matter of minutes with finding estate records of deceased persons, while similar requests from Blacks cannot be served? Not satisfied with the sweeping statement that this is the result of colonialism and apartheid, she follows the track of so-called “Native estates” through legislation, record creation and disposal, records management and administrative neglect, authorised and unauthorised destruction, transfer and appraisal, selective processing, and (almost) final amnesia. Eventually she discovers over 11,000 forgotten surviving African estate records – but also evidence for the destruction of many others. And she demonstrates the potential of these records to interpret the lives of those who otherwise appear in history only as statistics – records which were condemned to destruction by colonial archivists stating they had “little research value and no functional value”.

This study of memory against forgetting is a call to post-colonial archives to re-visit their holdings and the systemic colonial bias that continues to haunt them. This is the revised version of Ellen Namhila’s 2015 doctoral thesis published at the University of Tampere, Finland.

Ellen Ndeshi Namhila was born at Ondobe village in northern Namibia in 1963, and went into exile when she was twelve years old. She got her education in Namibia, Angola, Zambia, The Gambia, and Finland, obtaining an M.SSc. in Library and Information Science at the University of Tampere, Finland. She has worked as a researcher and librarian at the Multidisciplinary Research Centre; as a Deputy Director: Research, Information and Library Services at the Namibian Parliament; and as a Director of Namibia Library and Archives Service in the Ministry of Education. She is currently the University Librarian at the University

of Namibia. Ellen is author of: The Price of Freedom, her autobiography (1997); Kahumba Kandola - Man and Myth: the Biography of a Barefoot Soldier (2005); Tears of Courage: Five Mothers Five Stories One Victory (2009).

278 pages | 244 x 170 mm | 2017 | Basler Afrika Bibliographien, NamibiaPaperback: 978-3-905758-78-8 $38/£30


New Title

Social Memory, Silenced Voices, and Political StruggleRemembering the Revolution in ZanzibarEdited by William Cunningham Bissell and Marie-Aude Fouéré

This volume focuses on the cultural memory and mediation of the 1964 Zanzibar revolution, analyzing its continuing reverberations in everyday life.

The revolution constructed new conceptions of community and identity, race and cultural belonging, as well as instituting different ideals of nationhood, citizenship, sovereignty. As the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the revolution revealed, the official versions of events have shifted significantly over time and the legacy of the uprising is still deeply contested. In these debates, the question of Zanzibari identity remains very much at stake: Who exactly belongs in the islands and what historical processes brought them there? What are the boundaries of the nation, and who can claim to be an essential part of this imagined and embodied community?

Political belonging and power are closely intertwined with these issues of identity and history—raising intense debates and divisions over precisely where Zanzibar should be situated within the national order of things in a postcolonial and interconnected world. Attending to narratives that have been overlooked, ignored, or relegated to the margins, the authors of these essays do not seek to simply define the revolution or to establish its ultimate meaning. Instead, they seek to explore the continuing echoes and traces of the revolution fifty years on, reflected in memories, media, and monuments. Inspired by interdisciplinary perspectives from anthropology, history, cultural studies, and geography, these essays foreground critical debates about the revolution, often conducted sotto voce and located well off the official stage—attending to long silenced questions, submerged doubts, rumors and secrets, or things that cannot be said.



Perpetuating Dependence: Expert Advice as Tool of Foreign AidForeign aid has been subject to critique continuously for quite some time, not least by individuals who have been involved in formulating and executing policies and programmes.

William Easterly, a former World Bank economist and now professor at New York University, published a book with the provocative title The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor. Therein, he condemns aid agencies for maintaining the ‘technocratic illusion’ that expertise will solve the problems of the developing world; in his view, the advice of technocrats has helped to oppress people rather than to free them from poverty (Easterly 2013). While certainly taking one of the strongest positions, Easterly has not been the first critic of expert advice as a tool of development aid. Doubts about the impact of expert support were broached early on. Already in 1968, an economist at Washington State University published an article ‘Why Overseas Technical Assistance is Ineffective’ (Loomis 1968). In 1989, Richard Jolly, at that time Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, stated that “the vast bulk of technical experts and expertise at present provided by the UN and donor system has outlived their usefulness” (Jolly 1989: 21). A few years later, Edward VK Jaycox, the World Bank’s former vice-president for Africa, described the use of expatriate advisors as “a systematic destructive force which is undermining the development of capacity in Africa” (Jaycox 1993).

The aid community has reacted to the persistent critique of one of its main devices by routinely commissioning studies on the impact of technical assistance under which expert advice is commonly subsumed.1 Though varying in terms of focus, scope and methodology, many of these evaluations yielded similar findings; to give just a few examples.

Looking at the 900 man years of assistance we must conclude that the institutional framework that should lead to a transfer of knowledge was non-existent or crippled. (Forss et al.1988: ii)

Technical cooperation has not produced the national capacity necessary for self-reliance. (Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs Norway & Asplan Analyse 1994: 9)

A significant proportion of current technical assistance is ineffective (…). (Greenhill 2006: 24)

It is only in a minority of the cases reviewed that a capacity development impact can be identified. (DFID 2006: xiv)

Almost without exception the reports share the same circular structure: the identification of obstacles which impeded ‘capacity-building’ is followed by recommendations on how to improve the practice of technical assistance in order to increase its ‘effectiveness’ in future.

We refrain from following this pattern considering the problems of aid to be merely flaws of implementation. Rather, we see them to be fundamental in nature, pertaining to the structural complexities of knowledge transfer to young democracies as such. They concern issues of legitimacy and sovereignty on the recipients’ side, interacting with vested interests and domestic

political dependencies on the donors’ side. Despite all rhetoric of ‘partnership’, aid relations are subject to intrinsic constraints that thwart the claimed objective of foreign support, namely helping recipients to become self-reliant. Quite the contrary, the persistent interference by outside actors in our view undermines the development of young into strong democracies as it puts governments at risk of losing control over their own policy agendas.

Various scholars in political science, international relations and development studies have demonstrated that donors continue to exert significant influence on policy decisions in recipient states, even though aid ‘conditionality’ has formally been abandoned in the post-structural adjustment era.2 The new emphasis on national ‘leadership’ and ‘ownership’, many argue, makes things worse since it overplays the agency of beneficiaries, while masking the pervasive involvement of external funders. Focusing particularly on the World Bank’s role in Africa, Harrison (2004: 88) has shown how the innovation of mechanisms such as Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs)3 and Sector-wide Approaches (SWAps)4 has legitimated “intense and routine donor involvement” in recipient countries’ policy space. Dijkstra (2005: 462), analysing the formulation processes of PRSPs in Bolivia, Honduras and Nicaragua, found that these were “written because donors want them to be written”, that the elected parliaments were barely involved, and that donor- organised ‘dialogue’ with civil society served as a ‘cosmetic’ element rather than being a serious effort to enhance participation. Holtom (2007) and Pender (2007) came to a similar conclusion for the PRSP process in Tanzania. The latter inferred that the new ‘partnership’ with donors “involves more, not less, domination” (Pender 2007: 117). In one of the most recent and comprehensive publications on contemporary aid and power relations, the authors examined to what extent aid-receiving governments in Africa have been able to retain control over their policy agendas, and why some have been more successful than others (Whitfield 2009b).5 The economic, political, ideological and institutional conditions of states were deemed decisive in this regard since they heavily influenced governments’ strategies for dealing with donors. While Whitfield and other authors investigated aid as a matter of negotiation, we look at it primarily as a problem of (imposed) expert advice which, as will be argued, invariably carries vested interests and perpetuates existing dependencies in donor-recipient relations.

Aim and structure of the book

This book sets out to reveal the complexities of expert advice in the aid context and to assess its impact on policy-making in young democracies. To do so we carried out empirical research in South Africa and Tanzania, two African countries which over the past decades have received lavish donor support for system reforms in almost all fields of governance.6 The focus of this study is on the areas of education, health and environment on the grounds that (a) they are high on the development agendas of both countries; (b) they have been priority areas of external engagement; and (c) they rely on different types of expertise and ‘evidence’ for policy legitimation. By comparing different sectors in two different countries, both of which are comparatively young democracies but have very different economic strengths, we expected to find out (1) what are the complexities of knowledge transfer through foreign experts in general; and (2) what role structural conditions such as the political and administrative systems and economic wealth have in helping the recipients of outside aid in retaining control over their policy agendas.


Best Seller

The Delusion of Knowledge TransferThe Impact of Foreign Aid Experts on Policy-making in South Africa and TanzaniaEdited by Susanne Koch and Peter Weingart

With the rise of the ‘knowledge for development’ paradigm, expert advice has become a prime instrument of foreign aid. At the same time, it has been object of repeated criticism.

The chronic failure of ‘technical assistance’ – a notion under which advice is commonly subsumed – has been documented in a host of studies. Nonetheless, international organisations continue to send advisors, promising to increase the ‘effectiveness’ of expert support if their technocratic recommendations are taken up. This book reveals fundamental problems of expert advice in the context of aid that concern issues of power and legitimacy rather than merely flaws of implementation. Based on empirical evidence from South Africa and Tanzania, the authors show that aid-related advisory processes are inevitably obstructed by colliding interests, political pressures and hierarchical relations that impede knowledge transfer and mutual learning. As a result, recipient governments find themselves caught in a perpetual cycle of dependency, continuously advised by experts who convey the shifting paradigms and agendas of their respective donor governments.

For young democracies, the persistent presence of external actors is hazardous: ultimately, it poses a threat to the legitimacy of their governments if their policy-making becomes more responsive to foreign demands than to the preferences and needs of their citizens.

398 pages | 254 x 178 mm | 2016 | African Minds Publishers, South AfricaPaperback: 978-1-928331-39-1 $52/£40 eBook: 978-1-928331-41-4 $39/£30


New Title

Liberation and Technology. Development possibilities in pursuing technological autonomyGussai H. Sheikheldin

“The most fundamental difference between ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ societies is technology, in a broad yet specific sense”; so states the author of this important study.

The ways in which technology is developed, institutionalized, animated and celebrated, form the core of ‘development’ (human, economic, environmental, etc.) and ultimately civilization itself. But ‘techno-spheres’ are not only technical. They are also social, political, and ideological. For societies and countries that have long been kept from realizing their own prosperity and dignity, development is also liberation.

The main treatise of this book is that each developing society ought to seek to achieve technological autonomy in its quest for positive transformations and prosperity for its people. Technological autonomy is about attaining a high level of self-determination in planning and managing technological affairs. Attaining endogenous capacity to guide and execute decisions on production and innovation; creating and transferring key technological products and services; steering relevant foreign and local investment as well as trade; setting own priorities of development free from external manipulation; are goals that must be central to such planning efforts. With evidence and argument, and in plain language, this book suggests a novel way of thinking about development, through envisioning and building better techno-social systems.

For these reasons this book is a welcome addition to the body of ideas informing practitioners and theorists in the field of development—political leaders, economists, sociologists, engineers, technologists, scientists, scholars, planners and activists who are involved in relevant development processes and liberation struggles.

Gussai H. Sheikheldin has broad knowledge and experience from the study and practice of sustainable development, technology localization, and relevant advocacy. Gussai seeks to understand and illuminate the dynamic interactions between technologies and institutions, at local and global scales, and how they influence social transformation and human worldviews. He is a research fellow with STIPRO (Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Research Organization), a think tank of national, regional and global outreach, based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.



New Title

Going to UniversityThe Influence of Higher Education on the Lives of Young South AfricansJennifer Case, Delia Marshall and Sioux McKenna

Around the world, more young people than ever before are attending university. Student numbers in South Africa have doubled since democracy and for many families, higher education is a route to a better future for their children.

But alongside the overwhelming demand for higher education, questions about its purposes have intensified. Deliberations about the curriculum, culture and costing of public higher education abound from student activists, academics, parents, civil society and policy-makers. We know, from macro research, that South African graduates generally have good employment prospects. But little is known at a detailed level about how young people actually make use of their university experiences to craft their life courses. And even less is known about what happens to those who drop out.

This accessible book brings together the rich life stories of 73 young people, six years after they began their university studies. It traces how going to university influences not only their employment options, but also nurtures the agency needed to chart their own way and to engage critically with the world around them.

The book offers deep insights into the ways in which public higher education is both a private and public good, and it provides significant conclusions pertinent to anyone who works in – and cares about – universities.

Jennifer Case is Department Head and Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech in the USA.

Delia Marshall is a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of the Western Cape, with a research interest in undergraduate physics education and higher education studies.

Sioux McKenna is the Director of Postgraduate Studies at Rhodes University where she also coordinates the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning PhD programme.

176 pages | 254 x 178 mm | 2018 | African Minds Publishers, South AfricaPaperback: 978-1-928331-69-8 $30/£23


Special Item

Southern African Liberation Struggles 1960-1994Contemporaneous DocumentsEdited by Arnold J. Temu and Joel das Neves Tembe

These 9 volumes are the most comprehensive historical record of the liberation struggles in southern Africa.

Comprising 2.4 million words in 5,394 pages, they record interviews with liberation fighters and supporters in the Frontline states and the extraordinary sacrifices they made so that Africa could at last be free. With the fall of the South African apartheid regime, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) identified the need to record the experiences of the liberation struggles in Southern Africa, from 1960 until that final liberation in 1994. To that end, SADC launched the Hashim Mbita Project – named after the last Executive Secretary of the OAU Liberation Committee.

The research covered liberation movements in the countries which engaged in liberation wars, the Frontline states and Extension countries; and the Research Project team comprised members from the SADC mainland states of Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho and Swaziland. The support received from other regions is documented: Anglophone West Africa, Francophone Africa, North Africa, East Asia, Canada and the United States, Cuba and the Caribbean, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Nordic Countries, Western Europe, the Soviet Union, Non-Aligned Movement: India, Yugoslavia, Indonesia, Sri lanka; Organisation of African Unity and United Nations.

5394 pages 9 Vols | 234 x 156 mm | 2015 | Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, TanzaniaCased: 978-9987-753-28-4 $800/£500


New Title

Human Trafficking and Trauma in the Digital EraThe Ongoing Tragedy of the Trade in Refugees from EritreaEdited by Mirjam van Reisen and Munyaradzi Mawere

Eritrean refugees crisscross between countries in the Horn of Africa and North Africa in search of a safe place. Along their journeys, they are looted, threatened, intimidated, violated, and held for ransom.

This book revisits the human trafficking crisis that first emerged in the Sinai at the end of 2008 and examines the expansion of human trafficking of Eritrean refugees and other forms of exploitation beyond the Sinai. It focuses on the modus operandi of these practices and on identifying their key facilitators and beneficiaries. The book locates the origin of these practices within Eritrea; it reveals how a deliberate policy of impoverishment and human rights abuses has driven the people out of the country, and how individuals within Eritrea, and particularly within the ruling party, benefit from the smuggling and trafficking of Eritrean refugees. The use of information communication technologies (ICTs) is identified as key to the new modus operandi of this criminal business and is found to further facilitate widespread collective trauma amongst Eritreans, who witness the abuse of their family members and fellow nationals through digital networks. An entire section in this book is dedicated to assessing the extent and effects of individual and collective trauma caused by Sinai trafficking and to examining potential approaches to healing. Other sections discuss the vulnerabilities of Eritrean minors and women, and the connections between human trafficking, terrorism and organ trafficking. The last section of the book raises the question of accountability. It examines and evaluates international responses to this forgotten crisis, and discusses the need for policies that tackle the problem where it emerges: in Eritrea.

Mirjam van Reisen is Professor of ‘International Relations, Innovation and Care’ at Tilburg University, and Professor ‘Computing for Society’ at Leiden University.

Munyaradzi Mawere is a Professor in the Simon Muzenda School of Arts, Culture and Heritage Studies at Great Zimbabwe University.

520 pages | 229 x 152 mm | 2017 | Langaa RPCIG, CameroonPaperback: 978-9956-764-87-7 $48/£36 / eBook: 978-9956-764-53-2 $30/£24


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